Native Plants: Skunk Cabbage

Confession: I love skunk cabbage. You’ll never trust me again, will you, dear reader?  Skunk Cabbage is so much more beautiful than its name. A traditional famine food of usually well-provisioned coastal peoples, the heady and enormous yellow flowers are a feast of colour in early spring forest. It’s skunky, yes, but not in an animalistic way. It’s skunky like beautiful oil rich plants are skunky.  I associate it with spring and early summer, cool dark places, and red cedar forests.

Native Plants: Salmonberry (Flowering Stage)

Salmonberries are delicious herbal, delicate, and sweet caviar-like berries which appear in the early to mid summer all down the coast of BC. They can be juiced, jellied, tinctured, brewed, and baked, but all of that is for later.

Now, in early spring, we have the delicate crepe-paper flowers. These are some of the first hints of brightness in the bushes along trails and roadsides.