Skunk Cabbage

Skunk cabbage is a low-growing plant of the arum family, native to the wetlands and damp hill slopes of eastern North America, from Nova Scotia across to Manitoba and south to Tennessee and North Carolina. It rises from a thick rhizome, and early in spring, often while snow and ice still lie, it sends up a spathe, yellowish green when young and smeared with purple as it ages, around a spadix that carries the flowers. The spadix makes its own heat, enough to melt a way up through frozen ground. Bruised, the plant gives off the rank smell that names it, and that carrion-like smell draws the blowflies that pollinate it. Many Native American peoples used it as a medicine, a seasoning and a talisman, the Winnebago and Dakota among them to loosen phlegm in asthma, and from 1820 to 1882 it was sold in pharmacy as the drug dracontium. Grieve calls it antispasmodic, expectorant and narcotic, tried for asthma, catarrh, rheumatism and dropsy, and counts the seeds stronger than the root. Cunningham makes it a feminine herb of Saturn and water whose power is legal matters: a little of it wrapped in a bay leaf on a Sunday makes a talisman that draws good fortune, and it is said to help in court cases.