Skunk Cabbage, ( “Polecat Weed”, “Hermit of the Bog”, Symplocarpus foetidus, Native Minnesota Wildflower plant, Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden

	Plants of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden
	Common Name	Scientific Name	Plant Family	Garden Location	Prime Season
	Skunk Cabbage	Symplocarpus foetidus (L.) Salisb. ex Nutt.	Arum (Araceae)	Woodland Bog	Early Spring
Other names and notes	(“Polecat Weed”, “Hermit of the Bog”). An erect perennial growing to 2-3 feet in heigth. The flowers on this plant are on a spadix (knob shaped cluster) contained within a spathe, which on this plant is mostly purple-brown and mottled with green. After flowering this part, which forms the seeds, is surrounded by the roundish large basal leaves. Flowers are 4-part, tiny, and green. The fruit that forms is a cluster of berries, bluish black in color. A plant of bogs and wet stream edges it is one of the very earliest harbingers of spring, (appearing as early as the 1st week of April). This plant is capable of generating a small amount of heat, thus helping the flower to attract pollinating insects to complete it’s cycle early in the season and even to melt any remaining snow around the plant. More below and click the "More" button. Eloise Butler's thoughts on this plant are also given below.

Notes: Eloise Butler's records show that she obtained plants of this species on June 3, 1907 from a site near the Lake Street Bridge in Minneapolis. In 1910 it was the first species planted in that year of early spring; and more were planted in 1911 from a site in Minnetonka, MN. Martha Crone planted it in 1938. It is listed on Martha Crone's 1951 census of Garden plants. In the Garden the plant grows in the moist soil of the north end of the bog. Native to the eastern edge of Minnesota from Lake County south to the Iowa border. Minnesota and Iowa form the western edge of its range which extends to the east coast, down to North Carolina and up into Ontario and Quebec.

Eloise Butler wrote: "The Skunk Cabbage is one of our earliest spring flowers, for it literally thaws through the soil of the icebound marshes. You will have a greater respect for Dame Nature’s ability as a packer if you take apart the leaf bud made up of many leaves tightly rolled one within another and smaller and smaller in the center. The bud expands into a clump of large leaves, from which the name cabbage is derived. The disagreeable odor is attractive to flies, which find a shelter from the cold within its purplish-red, hood-like spathe and pay rent by pollinating the flowers. The spathe - the showy part of the inflorescence - is merely a large leaf enwrapping numerous minute flowers set on a fleshy axis. It is always well to get at the roots of things. If you dig deep down into the muck you will discover a stout subterranean stem, from which spring many roots ringed like angleworms. These roots have contracted like muscles, thereby forming the rings and giving the stem a deep, safe anchorage in the earth. This is only one of the many instances of self-burial by a “pull on the stem.” (Published in the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune, May 14, 1911) (Read)

This plant is not showy but has unusual traits worth talking about. For more info and lore click here:

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References: Plant characteristics are generally from sources 32, W2, W3, W7 & W8 plus others as specifically applies. Distribution principally from Wi, W2 and 28C. Planting history generally from 1, 4 & 4a. Other sources by specific reference. See Reference List for details.

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