Eastern Skunk Cabbage

Eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) is a favorite native plant because it's so weird and rare. What you're looking at in the above photo is a plant about six inches tall. The red thing is a spathe--a special kind of leaf that surrounds a spadix, the little ball-shaped cluster of flowers peeking out from the center.

What's so special about skunk cabbage (besides everything else about it) is that it's one of a few thermogenic plants. It has the ability to "generate temperatures of up to 15–35 °C (27–63 °F) above air temperature by cyanide resistant cellular respiration in order to melt its way through frozen ground" (wikipedia). It's one of the earliest spring native plants and comes up as early as February in Iowa.

These photos were taken on April 3rd at Hanging Bog Preserve in Linn County, Iowa. Hanging Bog is a Nature Conservancy site six miles outside of Cedar Rapids. It's not large, but it's very important because it's so unique:

"Hanging Bog gets its name from a series of saturated terraces on the lower slopes of the wooded hillsides. These terraces formed from large deposits of porous lime, called "tufa", which were deposited by mineral-rich groundwater that flows across an impermeable layer of buried bedrock and seeps out of the side of the hill. These unique conditions are ideal for the growth of skunk cabbage." (The Nature Conservancy)

Leaves unfurl as the flowers wilt, and in a matter of weeks, all that you'll see is large, green cabbage-y tufts.

Oh yeah, you might be wondering where does the "skunk" part come in. That would be the fetid odor that is released when the leaves are bruised. I've never smelled it myself.

Another fun fact about skunk cabbage is it has contractile roots. The roots pull the plant deeper into the mud, so the plant is actually growing downward underground. Including this botanical illustration to give you an idea of what that looks like:

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A post shared by Stephanie Heifner (@stephanie.heifner) on Mar 3, 2018 at 1:55pm PST

The illustration is by Mary Vaux Walcott, 1918.

From the top of the hill looking down on Hanging Bog.