Where water and fire become plant

There’s some plants that seem to defy things you know about the plant world. Some have uncanny feeding mechanisms – more in common for diet with possums and skunks are the sundews and pitcher plants as meat eating and insectivores. Some have fascinating defence mechanisms that target humans, and few other species – giant hog weed, poison ivy.

Skunk cabbage – simplocarpus foetidus – found in the eastern parts of Turtle Island are so outside of what anyone should think of as normal plants. I am fascinated by them, and I have learned to respect these incredible plants.

Little flames of heat

The skunk cabbage doesn’t simply emerge from the land. As they grow, they build heat and melt the snow and ice around them. They are peculiar little beings, almost unheard of in the plant world. The pods, called spathes, generate heat – they are exothermic, like mammals. They can generate up to 15C to melt the land around them.

This process wakes the insects in their vicinity – flies, beetles, other critters that then are attracted to their smell.

Stink and pollination

There is a small list of plants that do not get pollinated in the ways most people imagine. When we talk pollinators, people think bees, butterflies, the gorgeous flyers who are the most sung heroes of meadows and gardens.

Flies, beetles, and gnats gather around, attracted by the strong carrion smell and become the pollinators. This process awakens the insects that do heavy spring lifting of breaking down the animals and other critters that didn’t make the long winter as they thaw from the landscape.

Shelter and food

Bees choose to take shelter in the spathes in early spring. When bees emerge, there is often still snow and ice, or cold, and these incredible spathes provide not only a self heated shelter, but the pollen of the skunk cabbage provides some protein for the early bees.

Often you will also find spiders in spathes. Here they have the ability to stay warm, and also catch and feed upon other insects.

The skunk cabbage is a kick starter of early ecological waking after a long winter for so many insects. It is a heavy lifting plant.

Building a vast ecology

The skunk cabbage creates massive leaves. These leaves emerge by unfolding around a central growth in classic form. They create a large shaded area maintaining the wetlands below them. This precious area is ripe for salamanders, newts, frogs, and so many other reptiles and amphibians. The health of the wet soils under a skunk cabbage is often unmatched – it teems with life. They hold an ecology from emergence to when they wilt.

And that is another uncanny aspect. These large leaves that can take the appearance almost of an extremely large hosta do not dry out. They turn brownish and develop holes as they almost melt into a goo. Their existence is from the water, made out of water, and melts back into water as they fold back and melt away in late summer.

When I think of them, I think about how they emerge looking like the licks of flames – reaching and creating heat. Water turned into heat. And when they slip back, they behave like they are melting – going from strong, truly structured and tough leaves back into a liquid state.

Relationships on the land

Beyond insect relationships, for so many it is hard to say what else finds their moments with skunk cabbages. For most mammals, the calcium oxalate crystals will burn the mouth almost on immediate contact with their leaf or liquid. But we have had some relationships with this plant as medicine and food.

The youngest shoots can be harvested, and after boiling and discarding the water at least twice, the shoots can be consumed as an early spring green.

The leaves are incredibly robust and can be used to wrap food for transport like one would use wax paper to wrap a sandwich. The leaves have also been used to poach fish – the strong odour giving way to creating a light pungency that isn’t quite like garlic, but in that way of flavour. The leaf isn’t eaten, it is one that lends itself to other ways of relationship.

And then the roots – when raw are as toxic as the rest of the plant. But to this we can look for a powerful additive to foods when prepared with knowledge and care. Roasting the roots destroys the toxicity and creates a strong medicine for several conditions, notably an anti-spasmodic useful for asthma. Poultices are also created to apply topically for rheumatism and inflammation. The flour made from this incredible root can be used as a flour to make foods.

The roots, however, a force to reckon with. These deep roots are notoriously difficult to dig.

Unless you know exactly how to process this plant into food and medicine, it is one that holds that key, that knowledge and relationship are not simply reading an article or finding information. Skunk cabbage, like so many in the plant nation, can cause real harms to the human who has an incomplete sense of the power of this plant.

Water indicator

I used to ramble quite a bit on the Cambridge to Paris rail trail. This incredible trail leads along the edge of the Grand River where you pass close to river’s edge here and there, but mostly up along the steep bluffs and banks where there is an incredible vantage of the river and lands around it. One place you never truly expect to find water loving plants is up a steep, long bank sometimes 100m or more from the the water.

But this section of the Grand River has a particular story to it – hundreds of fresh water springs emerge from the upland banks and add cold, clean, fresh water to the watershed between Glen Morris and Paris. And for the person of knowledge, spotting some of these springs is possible by knowing who among the plant relations will be present. If you look uphill and see the broad, bright green leaves of a skunk cabbage, you have found a spring.

Go look today

The skunk cabbage in its most unusual form would be the spathe. They are out right now melting the snow and ice around them. When you first encounter them it is with a feeling of witnessing something that doesn’t seem quite like a plant, and not exactly an animal, and not an insect or reptile. They have an appearance of an otherwordly being standing next to and in the ice and snow. But seeing them is like seeing the most ancient among us bloom forward in ways that few take shape. And they remain a fascination in every form until they retreat to seed, which is still a fascination of geometry. Watch for the melt circles. Go see the plants. Spend time with them and watch the early emerging ecology they build.