PAT NEAL: Celebrating the skunk cabbage

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, March 18, 2026

THERE IS NOTHING more beautiful than a swamp full of skunk cabbage in the snow. The appearance of these bright yellow flowers in a frozen field of white tells us winter might not be over, but spring is on the way.

The fact that these beautiful flowers can grow in freezing weather is but one more piece of evidence that supports the longtime epic campaign spearheaded by this column, that the skunk cabbage should replace the rhododendron as the new official Washington state flower.

The luxuriant yellow blossoms of the skunk cabbage form an enchanting tableau in our roadside bogs that often appear irresistible to tourists.

When you see someone parked by the side of the road picking skunk cabbage flowers, you know they are from someplace far away.

While the practice of picking wildflowers is generally discouraged in our wild lands for fear it would deprive other nature lovers of the enjoyment of the missing flowers, visitors to the Olympic Peninsula are encouraged to pick all the skunk cabbage they could possibly want.

Until the pungent aroma of the blossoms starts the eyes watering, causing the tourists to swerve to the side of the road and toss the flowers into the ditch.

I ask you, has our current state flower, the rhododendron, ever produced this much entertainment for our state residents? No.

Their aroma is weak compared to the heady perfume of the skunk cabbage. I, and many other right-thinking skunk cabbage enthusiasts, abhor the corrupt political agenda of the inbred rhododendron cabal that made it the state flower in the first place.

The rhododendron does not share the cultural significance of the skunk cabbage in our Native American heritage, where it was seen as a starvation food in the time when there were no salmon and no Department of Fish and Wildlife to blame.

That would have been just after the continental ice sheet melted about 15,000 years ago. The salmon had yet to migrate here.

It was said the Great Spirit rewarded the skunk cabbage for saving the people by giving it a war club and an elk-hide blanket in the rich soil of the bottom lands.

Native Americans used skunk cabbage for medicinal purposes to cure headaches, fevers and female troubles. Putting skunk cabbage leaves in a canoe worked like a charm to calm the ocean so that seals would be easier to hunt. Skunk cabbage leaves were used to store cakes of dried berries, before the invention of Tupperware.

Once upon a time, I tried to celebrate the legacy of skunk cabbage by cooking the roots for a fancy dinner for people I didn’t like very much.

I boiled the roots with several changes of water until they were tender, then spread them out to dry on a cedar board. I left the cedar board out in the woods, then forgot where I put it.

The dinner was a complete success.

In addition to its cultural and culinary significance, a study published in the journal Nature showed that “respiratory control in homeothermic spadices of skunk cabbage is achieved by rate-determining biochemical reactions in which the overall thermodynamic activation energy exhibits a negative value.”

What does that mean?

It means the skunk cabbage flowers produce heat that melts the snow that attracts pollinators that spread pollen to other flowers.

Can a scraggly old rhododendron do that? No. They just sit in the beauty bark and drop their petals after a few days of blooming.

The skunk cabbage should be our true state flower. We’ll thank ourselves later if we do the right thing now.

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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.

He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.