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How does the county smell in wintertime? If there’s any smell at all, it’s mostly woodsy and pleasant, right? But we occasionally detect skunky smells, even in winter. Actual skunks could be responsible since they don’t hibernate in winter and they’re certainly plentiful enough
But in late winter, skunky smells may also come from flowers in bloom.
One of the earliest plants to flower in the county is the skunk cabbage, and if you have any nearby you know how hard it is to tell the plant from the animal using only your nose.
Eastern skunk cabbages (Symplocarpus foetidus) are common wetland plants that grow in swamps, marshes, and floodplains throughout eastern North America.
They are members of the arum family (Araceae) that includes a variety of important ornamental plants (Caladium, Philodendron, Dieffenbachia, Anthurium, Calla), wildflowers (Jack-in-the-pulpits, green dragons), and food plants (Taro, Mexican breadfruit).
All arums produce tiny flowers on a fleshy, erect stalk called a spadix enclosed in a leaf-like hood called a spathe. In skunk cabbages, the spathe is a purplish leaf that encloses a spherical spadix. The flowers are small, straw-colored and embedded in the spadix. The entire structure emits putrid smells that attract insect pollinators, usually flies and beetles. These can be seen swarming around the still unopened spathes, awaiting an opportunity to climb in.
Skunk cabbages are among the earliest plants to flower, sometimes as early as late January. This means they frequently have to push through snowy, icy, frozen muck.
And they do this by getting hot! Over a period of two weeks, the flowering stalks become noticeably warm to the touch, averaging 36° F warmer than the outside air temperature. It’s as if they were wired to a power supply.
Since most heat-producing arums are tropical this odd characteristic probably has more to do with attracting pollinators than with bearing up in the cold. One theory is that hot tissues better disseminate those funky arum aromas that attract pollinators.
But in the deep freeze of a Rappahannock winter, heat for its own sake becomes highly adaptive. Hot skunk cabbages can flower when other plants remain dormant.
Flowering is followed by growth of vegetative shoots that elongate rapidly as it warms up, unfurling large green leaves, some three feet long or more. Like the flowers, leaves are smelly and emit heat. They are also full of chemicals that make them taste bad to herbivores and to us.
By midsummer, leaves die
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