Over the next few weeks, skunk cabbage will bloom across the swamplands of the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. This precocious event is facilitated by the plant's capacity to generate heat, which allows its flower stalk to rise through the frozen soil and its overlying coat of ice or snow. Biochemical reactions, fed by a rich supply of starch in the root stalk, supply the heat, which attracts pollinating insects to the plant's hooded globe of flowers.
These pollinators, primarily carrion flies and beetles, are also attracted by a foul odor, emitted from the flowers, for which the plant is named. Late winter hikers may also detect this smell and will encounter purplish sheaths (spathes), which enclose the globe of cream-colored flowers. Within a few weeks, these spathes begin to decay and a rosette of bright green leaves, resembling a cabbage, appears. This foliage grows into a whorl of broad leaves, several feet in length, which mature by May and decay by mid summer.
Meanwhile, the flower globes have become spheres of tightly-packed berries, each harboring a seed. Scattered across the swampland, they break apart by August and are fed upon by mice, turkeys, opossums, bears and other wildlife. Through the fall and winter, the buried stalk and its massive root system continue to expand, setting a series of buds years in advance of their odoriferous season in the sun.
