Rare (and smelly) corpse flower blooms in San Diego for 1st time in years

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Nov. 2 (UPI) -- The San Diego Botanic Garden welcomed thousands of visitors for a spooky -- yet stinky -- event on Halloween this year. The garden's rare corpse flower bloomed for the first time in years. The flower, known scientifically as amorphophallus titanum, began opening its flower mid-Sunday afternoon. The fully opened bloom lasts about 48 hours, so the garden expects the rare event to be over on Tuesday evening.

I threw this in the Fragile Earth forum because of this:

Corpse flowers can take seven to 10 years to produce their first bloom and thereafter bloom once every four to five years, so this week's event was a rare glimpse. The plant, native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra, is considered endangered, with fewer than 1,000 left in the wild. Workers pollinated the female flowers along the base of the plant with the hopes of generating new seeds to plant in the coming months.

Pretty cool, but there's a reason for the corpse moniker.

Their name comes from the pungent, rotting flesh smell the flower emits during its bloom. "The corpse flower is the rock star of the plant world," SDBG President and CEO Ari Novy said Sunday. "It is taking center stage today with its incredible bloom and stench."

All the crap in the world a going on and I randomly come across the corpse flower. I'm a little giddy as I found this to be a really cool little refuge from the so called real world, as nature is really the real world that we mostly forget about.

Not stinky, but plant related, I used to have a side yard overgrown with Sacred Datura which was a weed from hell and when it flowered at night you could smell if from a hundred yards or so and I gotta say, it brought in some huge moths that my cat used to like to release in my room. Took bleach to kill those buggers off and lots of it. Unlike the corpse, it's a hardy flower.

That plant must respond to homeless camps, public defecation and discarded hypodermic needles.

It has come out to feed... and California will make it "thicc"...

a reply to: TheSpanishArcher

There are actually more than a few plants that have blooms with a rotten meat smell.

The reason behind that is that the plants rely on flies, wasps and beetles for pollination as opposed to bees.

The Corpse Flower is talked about the most because of its rarity and its absolutely stunning bloom.

a reply to: madmac5150

Come on, man, this ain't the Mud Pit.

a reply to: Lumenari

Nature has it's ways, eh? I do love the oddities like this and plus, it's kinda rare which is sad but I guess spit happens.

a reply to: TheSpanishArcher

I thought you were talking about this



But damn, that is one phallic flower.

Flowers always give me hope, that we aren't too sexually repressed. After all, we give flowers, the plant's sexual reproductive organs, to show affection.

You go to love the smell, of a freshly ripped Vagina, nothing more refreshing than a bouquet of dicks in the living room

Eastern Skunk Cabbage uses a similar means to attract non bee pollinators. The flower is a bit sexual in appearance too.
The bloom generates heat, which can melt snow and ice, making it an early bloomer.

Breaking or tearing a leaf produces a pungent but harmless odor, the source of the plant's common name; it is also foul smelling when it blooms. The plant is not poisonous to the touch. The foul odor attracts its pollinators: scavenging flies, stoneflies, and bees. The odor in the leaves may also serve to discourage large animals from disturbing or damaging this plant, which grows in soft wetland soils.

My grandmother used to grow those, I think she divided them to reproduce the plant. She brought them indoors in the winter and got them to bloom every year somehow. I saw them, they are tall and stinky, but for all her effort to get them to bloom and divide the bulbs into new plants, I thought it was too much for such a short and smelly show.

She had like a dozen of them, I never knew how she got them to divide and bloom every year, she was no expert, just a great big green thumb.