Our first bloomers of the season – Western Skunk Cabbage!

We have two areas of our property where water runs year round, roughly in the areas marked in blue:

These are not raging torrents. I’ve attempted to measure their flow at what I judged was the peak time of the year, using a PVC pipe, a 5 gallon bucket, and a stopwatch. By channeling all of the flow into the pipe, and having the pipe dump into the bucket, you can time how long it takes to fill the bucket. The stream closer to the house was running at about 5 gallons per minute late last winter, and the stream farther from the house was running at about 15 gallons per minute. It’s not perfect – some water escapes and doesn’t enter the PVC pipe, and the water flow is highly variable – but it gives an idea nonetheless.

Although our winters are very wet, our summers are extremely dry. We probably go at least two months without a drop of rain, from sometime in July to sometime in September. At the end of this dry spell, our little streams are just mere trickles, but they never stop completely. This makes fertile ground for skunk cabbage, which will only grow in areas where it can get its feet wet. Here’s a recent shot of skunk cabbages growing along the far stream where it meets the lake:

These unique plants are our first bloomers of the season, and produce a large yellow bloom, seen here:

The outer part is called a ‘spathe’, and the conelike structure inside is called a ‘spadix’, which is covered in small flowers. It is the spadix that produces the pungent smell that is the namesake of this plant (which isn’t a cabbage at all). The smell attracts flies and beetles, which pollinate it. To me the smell isn’t very much like a skunk’s, but it’s not particularly pleasant either.

Later in the season the blooms fall away, but the leaves continue to grow to enormous sizes – reportedly up to four and a half feet long and two and a half feet wide! We’ve never seen them that large on our property, but they do get quite big. They’re rather fragile though, and break off easily. Apparently they’re also mildly poisonous – they contain a concentration of crystals of calcium oxalate which can produce a stinging, burning sensation in the mouth when chewed raw. Native Americans were able to work around this by roasting and drying the leaves.

This was one of the first plants that really had a wow factor for us when we moved here. There’s nothing remotely like it in Arizona as far as we know.

I’ll leave you with this final image…Sherri put this together today, it’s quite whimsical. Recognize the leaf and the bloom? It’s our Western Skunk Cabbage friend.

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