THE TRUTH ABOUT SKUNK CABBAGE
The Monday Garden, Eco-gardening at its best
April 3, 2005, Issue 158
There should be a national skunk cabbage day. Skunk cabbage is a wonderful native plant, first to bloom after the witch hazel, the silver maple, and the crocus, as much a symbol of woodland spring as the returning robins. This ancient, lovely and mysterious guardian of the wetlands is a plant about which many lies are told.
Common wisdom is that skunk cabbage is a stinky, ugly trash plant. Wrong. I have read that the smell comes only from the leaves that only unfold after the flowers are done but that the smell's purpose is to attract pollinating insects. Not possible. It is said that you can eat raw skunk cabbage leaves after boiling; other reports indicate that you'd do better to invite an actual skunk into the kitchen because, then, at least the skunk would (possibly) enjoy the process.
picture: skunk cabbage heralding spring at the Bartlett Arboretum, Stamford CT, March 2005
FAMILY: Our native eastern skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, is in the Arum family (Araceae), like the native jack-in-the-pulpit, and the tropical calla lily. The first interesting think about skunk cabbage is that even though it is as common as the mud in which it grows from Southern Canada to Northern Georgia, there's only one species of it. It is so suited to its environment that part of the clan has not evolved into a genetically separate species. (The yellow-spathe western skunk cabbage, Lysichitum americanum, is also in the Arum family but different genus, so it is a cousin, not a sibling, and has different qualities.) Tropical Arum cousins that you might be harboring at home include philodendron, dieffenbachia (dumbcane), and aglaonema (Chinese evergreen).