A rare beauty with a foul odor
A feeling of awe washes over us when we realize we are witnessing a rare earthly occurrence. When I visited the San Diego Botanic Garden I wasn’t expecting to see a flower so significant that it has its own media page.
The Beauty
The flower spike of the corpse plant is the longest unbranched flower spike of any plant in the world. During the bloom, the massive floral spike (up to 12 feet tall, in the wild), which looks like one enormous flower, opens its deep red, petal-like spathe, to reveal hundreds of tiny flowers at the base of the spadix, the tall, yellow pillar of the structure. — San Diego Botanic Garden
The Odor
Luckily I didn’t catch a whiff of the order this beauty produces. The smell is described as cheese, garlic, smelly feet, diapers, or rotten fish that attracts pollinating insects. If the smell isn’t bad enough on its own, the corpse flower actually generates heat to propel the smell further up into the layers of the canopy of the rain forest to attract more pollinators.
Catching a glimpse
It takes a lot of energy for a bloom so large. It takes several years to bloom and the bloom may last as few as 24 hours. It will collapse within 48 hours. Seeing any part of the process is quite a lucky find.
The Amorphophallus titanum — or titan arum, as it is also known — is an endangered plant that grows on Indonesia’s island of Sumatra, with fewer than 1,000 plants remain in the wild. In order to expand the shallow genetic pool of this rarely blooming plant, each plant is manually pollenated.
— San Diego Botanic Garden
Thanks for reading! I hope everyone stumbles upon rare earthly occurrences that they can savor. More about this one below: San Diego Botanic Garden – Located North of San Diego in Encinitas, California.
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