SKUNK CABBAGE 



Symplocarpus foetidus (L.) Nutt. 



Early spring Crisp and colorful and oi'iiamental, the skunk cabbage 

 Swamps pushes through the spring mud of the swamp and blos- 



soms in the weak sunlight of March. There is wry beauty 

 in this flower and its leaves; it is not the beauty of a rose or a lily, nor 

 of any sweet, sunlit thing. But this is the rhythm of an art feeling ex- 

 pressed in coiled, lettuce-green leaves and ivory midribs, in mottled, 

 purple-red-brown, shell-shaped flowers with no stems to lift them above 

 the mud. Just as there is nothing like the jack-in-the-pulpit, so is there 

 nothing at all like the skunk cabbage before the woods awake to spring. 



The skunk cabbage in northern Illinois comes into being often before 

 tlie redwinged blackbirds have come back to the marsh. Skunk cabbage 

 precedes robins and blue])irds by many days, and is so far ahead of the 

 other spring flowers that it usually is well out of bloom before the spring 

 l)eauties or the bloodroot blossom. 



Skunk cabbage is an Arum. The typical shape is there — the stout 

 spadix- enclosed in a cupped sheath. On the spadix are borne the small 

 true flowers which are visited by the earliest insects. The stout, squat 

 "flower" emerges dni-kly and ruddily i'rom the mud and emits a strange 

 carrion odor. In a lew days the folded, pale green, waxen leaves pierce 

 the mud and stand in a tiglit gToup beside the flowers. Then as spring 

 advances, the skunk cal)bage odor subsides. The flowers shrivel. The 

 leaves grow tall and spread wide on tall petioles, like pale green, glossy 

 burdock lea.ves. liy midsunnnci- the skunk cabbage is known by those 

 knee-high, clumps of great caladium-like leaves; known, too, when the 

 leaves are l)roken, by the strong odor of mustard plaster and onion. It 

 is as staunch an odor as that carrion smell of early spring, or as the 

 perfume of the skunk itself on a summer evening. 



