Thinking, no 'Stinking Spring,' the poor under appreciated skunk cabbage

"Ooh that smell, can't you smell that smell?"
                                                                                               - Lynyrd Skynyrd

One of nature's harbingers of spring is skunk cabbage.

Skunk cabbage emerges from late February through May, according to a post on the National Wildlife Federation's website.

"Skunk cabbage is a flowering perennial plant and is one of the first plants to emerge in the spring.

​The flowers appear before the leaves and are characterized by a mottled maroon hoodlike leaf called a spathe, which surrounds a knob-like structure called a spadix.
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The spadix is actually a fleshy spike of many petal-less flowers," the post continued.

An article written by Joel Springsteen on the Urban Ecology Center's website explained how sunk cabbage can start to grow so early.

"The whole plant generates heat through cyanide-free cellular respiration ..., making it one of the few plants capable of this 'thermogenesis,'" Springsteen wrote.

"The plants can produce temperatures of ... 55-95 degrees  allowing them to grow through frozen ground. The heat may also help them spread the odor of their flowers and attract early spring pollinators which come to eat and take refuge in the flower structure," he continued.

This year so far, only the tops of the cabbages have appeared. Last year it took until late March for the plants to produce their spathes and spadixes. However, I have a photo from mid-April of last year of cabbages with their bright green leaves covered in snow.

What these past pictures showed me  is that winter sometimes likes to have the last word.

So is spring here to stay? I will only say it is on the way and that Mother Nature will do things in her own time.
While nature talks to us in many different ways, it is often furtive on exact dates and times.

That's just the nature of things 'round here.

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