Symplocarpus foetidus Seeds | Skunk Cabbage
LATIN NAME: Symplocarpus foetidus
COMMON NAME: Skunk Cabbage
Plant Profile
The hood is a spathe, a single modified leaf rolled into a pointed cowl, marbled in maroon and green. Inside sits the spadix, a club-shaped spike packed with hundreds of tiny flowers and no petals. The smell is a blend of sulfur-bearing volatiles of the kind that also rise from carrion, produced by the warmed spadix and carried out of the hood on the rising air.
The scent and the heat together make the hood worth entering: flesh flies, dung flies and small carrion beetles land, walk in the warm chamber and pick up pollen. For insects that must otherwise sit out the cold, a heated room is a good deal, and the plant gets pollen moved between neighbouring heads in exchange.
The flowers mature in a fixed order. In the first days after opening only the stigmas are receptive and no pollen is shed, so a visiting insect brings pollen from another plant rather than its own. Only later does the spadix release pollen, by which time its own stigmas have closed, an old device against self-pollination.
Every part of the plant carries idioblast cells stuffed with needle-shaped calcium oxalate crystals, which is why chewing fresh root or leaf burns the mouth and throat and why grazing animals leave it alone. The crystals are backed up by a proteolytic irritant in the sap, so the plant is poisonous raw. The same trick appears across the family.
The roots are unusual too: they thicken, anchor, then contract along their length, hauling the rhizome down into the muck. A seedling sits at the surface, but a plant of many seasons has been drawn well below it, so the growing point stays buried and only the leaves and the flower reach the air.
Science & Biotechnology
The warmth is not a by-product of ordinary breathing. Mitochondria in the flower head carry an alternative oxidase, a branch of the respiratory chain that accepts electrons without pumping protons across the membrane, so the energy of oxidation is released as heat rather than captured. A second leak, the plant uncoupling protein, does the same. Together they turn the spadix into a small stove, fed from starch stored in the rhizome.
Because the spadix holds its temperature within a narrow band while the air swings widely, it melts its way upward through a snowpack, leaving a hollow chimney with the mottled hood at the top.
Uses & Benefits
After flowering the plant produces a large rosette of broad leaves that lasts through spring and collapses by midsummer, leaving little to see. Pollinated flowers ripen into a compound fruit the size of a small fist, dark red-brown and made of many berries in a spongy core. It drops in late summer and breaks apart, and the seeds float, which is how colonies spread along a stream.
Growing from Seed
Grow it in the wettest, sourest corner you have, where the soil stays saturated and the pH is low. A planting pocket of two parts acid leaf mould, one part peat-free ericaceous compost and a handful of coarse bark suits it, with the rhizome set so the growing point sits just below the surface. Full sun to half shade is fine; the plant needs wet feet more than light. Do not add lime, and do not let the ground dry out in summer.
The one hard rule is that the seed is recalcitrant and dies if it dries: gather it and sow it fresh. Clean the seed from the broken fruit, sow it onto chopped sphagnum or a wet acid mix, cover it thinly, and stand the pot in water in a shaded frame. Keep it wet and give it the natural cold of winter, since the embryo needs a cold, moist period first.
The first leaves of a seedling are small and simple and look nothing like the mature rosette; full size returns as the plant builds a rhizome. Move seedlings on when the blade has reached about ten centimetres across, and expect a long-term planting rather than a quick one, because the contractile roots pull the crown deeper each year.
Our Take
This is not a sensible plant, which is exactly why I keep it. I have it at the edge of a wet corner where the ground never dries, and the reward is a hole melted through the snow in the worst weeks of the year. For company in wet ground I use Arisaema for the same aroid architecture on a lighter frame, crow-dipper for a smaller native-style colony, and sweet flag where the water is shallow and the soil is sour. Buy the seed fresh, keep it wet, and give it mud it can sink into.
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