Skunk Cabbage Can Generate Its Own Heat

If you time your skunk cabbage adventure just right, you can warm your finger inside  the teardrop shaped plant.  How does the skunk cabbage do this?  Just like those insulated gloves that keep your fingers warm on the coldest winter day, the hood, or spiral leaf that curls around itself, keeps the air space inside the hood that protects the spadix warm.  Keep an eye of the temperature, however. Skunk cabbage can turn off their heat if the temperature drops below freezing. Since they can't compete with this degree of cold, they do not try.  But when the air is above 32 degrees, the spadix, or the spike-like bud that is covered with fuzzy flowers that never bloom,  can produce a temperature of 70 degrees by drawing on the starches in the roots.
Read More About It!
Skunk Cabbage, Sundew Plants and Strangler Figs: And 18 More of the Strangest Plants on Earth by Sally Kneidel
Did You Know? Skunk cabbage can have roots as long as a foot and live for a hundred years? You may be smelling the same plant that the American Indians used for soups, stews and medicine. Or that  young, mischevious  tribesman may have kicked the same plant you did while running through the stream to spread its smelly odor. 

Bring Children Back To Nature Flower By Flower

Bring children back to nature: flower by flower; bird by bird, tree hallow by tree hallow. Curious By Nature  will be explore wildflowers, birds, and many other unique natural wonders one by one.  Just as knowing the name of a person connects you to that person, a child who  knows the name of a wildflower or bird will appreciate its importance and want to preserve it. To begin this adventure,  I will follow Frederic William Stack's book, Wildflowers Every Child Should Know published by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1909. Stack organizes his book according to color. I would like to explore each species by season. So check back for the first amazing wildflower that every child will remember by its smell, if  not its other characteristics. That's right. It is one of earliest plants to appear in New England.  By January or February you should be able to find this  Skunk Cabbage popping up in a still very cold bog along the side of a country road.  I'll be back with my own photo and more interesting facts about this member of the lilly family. Join me for this new adventure, flower by flower, bird by bird.