Wildflowers of Ainsworth: Skunk Cabbage

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Here we have skunk cabbage pushing its ugly little head up through the mud and rotted leaves next to a snowbank. I found this specimen in some swampy low ground near the Deep River.

Jack Sanders, in The Secrets of Wildflowers, has this to say about skunk cabbage:

Naturalist Neltje Blanchan described the smell [of skunk cabbage] as combining "a suspicion of skunk, putrid meat, and garlic." The scent is actually less like skunk than rotten meat or even dung. In fact, two of the scent-producing substances in skunk cabbage are skatole and cadaverine, the same chemicals found in a variety of decaying animal and vegetable matter.

Perhaps that scent comes later in its development — I didn't smell any cadavers while I was photographing it. It does have a lot of development to come. These things get huge.

Here's a miniature forest of moss against the snow: