by Leonard Adkins

It’s late winter and time to head to the woods for a wildflower hike. What? A wildflower hike in winter? Sure, most of us start thinking about Southern Appalachian wildflowers sometime in late March or early April, but there is a plant that is blooming right now that deserves your attention-and maybe even admiration.

Wrapping around themselves like a pair of cupped hands, the mottled green to dirty purple leathery shoots of the skunk cabbage create a hood, protecting a spike of tiny yellow flowers. Because it blooms when snow is on the ground, it has developed a mechanism to withstand the cold. By burning carbohydrates stored in its large root system, and produced from the cellular respiration resulting from its rapid growth, it is capable of producing its own heat, which often melts the snow and ice around it. Temperatures inside its spathe--the botanical term for the hood--have been found to be as much as twenty-seven degrees higher than the surrounding air.

Small gnats and flies inhabit the same marshy areas as the skunk cabbage and often emerge at about the same time as the plant. Easily able to pass through the openings in each spathe, the insects are attracted to the beads of nectar on the tiny flowers, thereby ensuring pollination. Often, bees and other larger insects, which may have a hard time finding food in early spring, become trapped, as they are able to push their way inside, but are then too large to escape back out of the opening.

Once the flowers fade away, cabbage-like leaves that can be up to three feet long and one foot wide grow on stalks that can reach a height of two feet. In some moist areas, their preferred habitat, they can become the dominant foliage. When young, the leaves are edible if boiled through several changes of water to remove the fetid odor and taste, and were once used to relieve the pains of rheumatism.

Skunk cabbage is quite a common plant and is found in much of North America from Washington, Oregon, and Canada to North Carolina, so go out and discover this stalwart little plant that’s able to bloom a month or more before the Vernal Equinox.

If you’re not exactly sure where to find it, head for Laurel Creek Valley in northeast Tennessee or Blue Ridge Parkway milepost 217 in North Carolina. In Virginia, look for it at the beginning of the Old Rag Trail in Shenandoah National Park and in Maryland on the lower elevations of Catocin Mountain Park. The boardwalk trails at Cranberry Glades and Cranesville Swamp, pathways in Upper Shavers Fork Preserve, boggy areas beside the West Fork Trail, and the shoreline of Spruce Knob Lake make West Virginia one of the best places to go for a mid-winter skunk cabbage hike.

Leonard M. Adkins is the author of Wildflowers of the Appalachian Trail and Wildflowers of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Learn more at www.habitualhiker.com.