The Titan Arum plant, nicknamed the Corpse flower because of its pungent smell of rotting flesh, is in full bloom after 75 years at the University of Basel in Switzerland. According to Bioscholar, the flower was expected to remain open until Easter Sunday.
The eight-foot plant, indigenous to Indonesia’s rain forests, has the largest unbranched shoot in the world. On average, they bloom once in a decade. Collectors and plant enthusiasts around the world desire Titan Arum because of its strange blooming patterns. Twelve of them are housed at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the Princess of Wales Conservatory among hundreds of other tropical plants. When the plants are ready to pollinate, the stem heats up to release a pungent smell, which lasts for about three days.
The largest Arum at Kew gardens weighs 200 pounds and grows at a staggering rate of a quarter of an inch an hour. It guzzles liquid fertilizer and potassium each week to keep up its strength while bedded in roomy surroundings. Sir David Attenborough, naturalist and a natural history filmmaker, who invented the name Titan Arum, was the first to capture it flowering on film for his BBC TV series “The Private Life of Plants”. He dropped the plant’s original name – Amorphophallus – perhaps because of the reference to male genitalia.
I could not help but laugh when I read this article. I found it very interesting that a plant could, in fact, smell like rotting flesh. I would have loved to witness this. I also found it rather humorous that it's original name referenced a penis.
This is really.. interesting. In a good way. I never knew that there was a flower that smelled like rotting flesh. And the original name is even unique. And its pretty amazing how big they get and that this flower is over 75 years old.
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