A 19th century writer, Alexandre Dumas was asked whence came the drive and energy for his prolific literary output. “I don’t know,” he responded. “Ask a plum tree how it produces plums.”

These days, as winter has lingered with snow and icy temperatures, one might ask this question of some herbaceous plant-family members. Skunk cabbage, a wildflower native of the eastern US deciduous forest region blooms in mid to late winter, defying snow and frozen ground and frigid air temperatures. It is among a very few flower species which have learned some tricks, over the 470 million-year span since the green plants moved on land, to generate their own heat.

Skunk cabbage stokes its furnace so effectively that it melts away snow and ice in a circular patch around itself, the result of dramatically increasing its respiration rate and rapidly burning starch from its underground stem. Botany researcher Roger Knutson studied the plant and its winter-flowering habit for nearly a decade. “At air temperatures near freezing,” he noted, “a seemingly inactive skunk cabbage spadix is using oxygen and burning food at a rate nearly equal to that of a hummingbird.” A thick, fleshy hood (spathe) surrounds the flower parts (spadix), insulating them so well that the interior retains a nearly constant, 72 to 74 degree temperature, “regardless of the temperature of surrounding air and soil.” It seems to have “not only a furnace but a thermostat as well,” Knutson notes. The year’s first nectar and pollen await honeybees and early spring insects in its “tiny island of dependable, near-tropical warmth.”  More...