Skunk Cabbage Paradise, Redux

 Wow!  If I'd known how much this knee replacement recovery was going to hurt, I might have reconsidered it. My physical therapists, though, are telling me my recovery is progressing splendidly, insisting that my flexibility and strength are already well beyond what most folks experience just one month after surgery on February 11.  Sadly, though, I haven't felt ready to go slogging through swales in search of our very first flower of spring, our native Swamp Cabbage.  I did, though, go searching through my blog archives for evidence that these fascinating plants could very well be blooming by this date.  And I sure found some!  This post, called "Skunk Cabbage Paradise,"  appeared on March 18 just one year ago, and it contained some of my very best photos of the flowers that often are hard to see, hiding deep within the bulbous spathes and dotting the interior spadices with tiny yellow blooms.  I found these photos especially interesting because they show both sexes of Skunk Cabbage florets, the spent pistillate florets yielding to the staminate ones emerging around the base of the pistillate ones.  With daytime temps between now (March 13) and next Tuesday (March 18) remaining above freezing, perhaps I might find such marvelous specimens on the same date this year. At least this old evidence proves that it would be possible.  If my knee pain relents a bit over the next 5 days, I might just go find out.

Skunk Cabbage Paradise ! (March 18, 2024)

I know, I know, I've been posting photos of Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) for a couple of weeks now. But all those specimens were total wimps compared to the gigantic ones that thrive in a swale at the Orra Phelps Nature Preserve in Wilton.  I'm not sure what kind of nutrients this particular mud provides, but the Skunk Cabbage plants that grow here are prodigious both in size and in the number of spathes that constitute a cluster.  By my count, I discern EIGHT flowering spathes in this one.

As for size of individual spathes, just look at how tall these gorgeously scarlet ones have grown!

And this was my lucky day for photographing a cluster with spathes so wide open that their flowering spadices within were completely visible.  How often have I found examples where both sexes of the florets -- pistillate (top left) and staminate -- were displaying within the same plant at the same time?  Never, before I encountered this remarkable clump.

Sadly, while trying to get close enough to photograph these plants, I inadvertently stepped on another one. In that mishap,  my big foot crushed the spathe but did not damage the spadix within.  And what a find this spadix was!  Never before had I encountered a spadix displaying the fading pistillate florets  yielding to the yellow pollen-laden staminate ones emerging around the base of the pistillate ones! How cool it that?