Perhaps I found them at the wrong time? Either way, they didn’t smell bad to me.Ī wild ginger flower hiding under leaf litter. I couldn’t smell anything in the flowers, I could only smell the ginger scent on their leaves and rhizomes. The flowers are pollinated by flies and supposedly smell like rotting meat to attract flies trying to find a place to lay their eggs. Pull the leaves back a bit and look for a few of the wild ginger flowers. They’re not visible because the plant sends them out under the leaf litter. The plants are low-growing, and the leaves are very vaguely similar, but coltsfoot leaves are in no way heart-shaped. When I was initially looking for it, I stopped and inspected just about every patch of coltsfoot along the trail, but that was only because I was so desperate to find it. If you’ve never seen wild ginger, it can be confused with coltsfoot leaves. The leaves are heart-shaped, which helps with identification. This patch below is along the side of a hiking trail in Central Vermont. Landscapers use it as a ground cover under dense shade, and it grows wild in woodland regions across the country. Wild ginger is a low-growing, shade-loving perennial with heart-shaped leaves. Either way, it’s commonly known as wild ginger. There are two species, Asarum canadense in the East and Asarum caudatum in the West. Before modern international trade, fresh ginger was a real treat.Įarly colonists in the US found a tasty substitute that that indigenous tribes had been using for centuries. Just about everyone knows what ginger looks like and that it’s a tropical plant.
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