Walk with me, where the skunk cabbage grows

With the weather getting warmer, I wanted to head over to one of my favorite trails and check out the skunk cabbage. I rode my bicycle to the start of the trail and walked over a short distance to a marshy beaver pond type area.

There the first of the skunk cabbage plants were starting to come up. Not too many were flowering yet but I got a couple of pictures. They are hard to get close to because the trail doesn’t go through the wet marshy area.

You can kind of see the type of terrain I had to get through from this photo of moss on tree branches:

Below is a close-up of the moss that I adjusted the background blur up on. There is moss growing all over the place around here. Lots of trees have special defenses to keep the moss from taking them over and pulling them down.

Below is a close-up of the skunk cabbage flower. I had to get my feet wet to take this picture. There weren’t that many blooming today but I’m sure in a few weeks they will be all over the place up here.

Here’s a wide angle view of the whole plant:

Skunk cabbages smell kind of funny. They attract certain types of insects for pollination with the oder. Later in the season the leaves will get really big, perhaps as large and a foot by three feet. I’ve always liked them, they look colorful in the swamp.

Here’s a picture of an old stump:

There are a lot of old stumps around here. Some of these trees must have been very old when they were cut down. You can see the notches that they made in the tree to support a platform that they used when cutting it down. Down slope from the stump if you look carefully you might be able to see a few skunk cabbages growing. (They are small and hard to spot in this photo unless you know what to look for)

Thanks for reading! I always value your support and comments. The pictures were taken by me with my Galaxy S9+ on March 21, 2018