Good timing - the titan arum at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is about to flower! My partner manages the Twitter account (in the persona of the plant itself) and I've just been bribed with pizza to give him a lift back to work tonight in case it opens up :)
One of the ones in SF bloomed just last weekend! Was very cool to see. Their lifecycle is very interesting too — an earlier stage of the plant is a large tree-like structure that is actually just a leaf! One of those was present as well.
Great Latin name: Amorphophallus titanium: "giant misshapen phallus"
Perhaps I do not have the details correct, but I was told this story: Kew Gardens had one of these flower in their greenhouse many years ago, when they were very unusual in "captivity". Another botanical garden (perhaps the one in St. Louis) subsequently was able to get one to flower, and the bloom was quite a bit larger. They printed up T-shirts that said "My Amorphophallus is bigger than yours"
I wonder if some botanical gardens also think about getting some carrion-eating flies and beetles (which are normally attracted to the flower and pollinate it) to make the experience more complete?
There at least the giant lily needs to be pollinated by hand as they are lacking the specialized beetles https://www.botmuc.de/en/audio_tour/202.html so I'd assume some gardens do think about these matters.
A corpse flower recently bloomed at the Denver Botanic Gardens [0]. I saw it, but unfortunately it had already wilted. I did not notice much of a smell. BTW, if you happen to be in the area, the Denver Botanic Gardens is a great way to spend an afternoon [1].
I can imagine why it's called corpse flower. I went on a backpacking trip through a rainforest in Thailand. There is similar flower there that's giant and smells like rotting flesh. They are quite impressive to see in person!
During the period when the corm produces a flower rather than a leaf, does the flower do any photosynthesizing, or does the energy to construct the flower come completely from the corm's stores? Wouldn't it need to photosynthesize just to fix the carbon to build the flower? (My understanding is that almost all the mass of plants comes from water and from carbon dioxide in the air, with the soil contributing mostly just trace minerals.)
Reply from my partner, a horticulturist at RBGE who works with the titan arum: "It's green so it's almost certainly is doing some photosynthesis but almost all of the energy is coming from the corm. There's enough energy in the corm to produce a flower, seeds and fruit; this can take 9 months, and during that period there's basically just a stump, no leaf. The corm depletes vastly after flowering. The titan arum we have is so big it seems to manage to have enough energy to produce a leaf again after flowering. Most just die after flowering and fruiting."
I am reminded of the stinkhorn, a mushroom which also smells like a corpse and which also has a phallus shape. I'm fortunate to have never smelled the corpse flower, but I have seen it. I am not so fortunate to have never smelled stinkhorns, however.
Tangentially, Sumatra and western Sumatra in particular are pretty interesting. They have possibly the best curry in Indonesia (beef rendang), different linguistic groups such as the Minangkabau[0], and just northwest off the coast they have one of the best natural surf breaks in the world.[1] A flooded volcano caldera to the north was a major point on the hippy trail in the 1970s[2], and one of the most impressive taxidermy museums on earth lies in Medan.[3] Critical in the historic interchange of ideas between Arabia, South and East Asia which formed the uniquely Indo-Chinese basis for Southeast Asian history, elsewhere on Sumatra they still have unexcavated ancient cities surpassing the scale of Angkor Wat.
We had one bloom in San Diego last fall, and I was very excited to smell something super pungent. It kinds of smelled like wet dirt, which was not much different than any other time inside an indoor greenhouse. It looked amazing, and was worth going just for that, but the smell was very underwhelming.
If one of these blooms near you, it's worth checking out! I can't speak to whether or not it stinks like a corpse, but I stuck my head down in there and it was certainly reminiscent of a juicy dumpster on a hot day.
I’ve seen a couple of these blooms—- first at the NCSU Plant Biology greenhouse and then at Tony Avent’s Plant Delights nursery.
Both were spectacular. Neither smelled at all.
I think the smell may only last for a short period, likely before the bloom peaks. We didn’t want to jump the gun on the bloom, so we visited a day after we heard it bloomed.
Yep, the smell dissipates pretty quickly, likely dispersed by the flower heating itself up about 10°C above ambient.
I visited the bloom my partner works with on the day after it opened, and while he attested that it was pretty stinky on opening, it wasn't really much to smell when I was there.
I wasn't able to smell it at all from a few feet away, but the one I saw recently wasn't roped off so I was pretty much able to stick my head right in the bloom.
I don’t particularly care for The Huntington. It is an extraordinary place that unfortunately came off as greedy. Entry is $25 per person. They have a nine figure endowment.
Perhaps they over reached on budget and needed a way to balance the books? It might also be priced like that to keep the rabble out. If it walks like elitism, and talks like elitism, etc.
It’s a shame — it really is an otherworldly achievement. One of the finest botanical gardens in the world.
I'll add this because it surprised me when I heard it: avocados, like apples, aren't true to seed, they are cultivated by grafting. If you plant the seed of a delicious Hass avocado, after 10+ years you'll get funny avocados.
YouTube (or more accurately the HTML video element) can go as fast as your computer can handle, the UI just doesn't surface it. Currently I use this bookmarklet:
On another computer I have a variant that just sets that to all the video tags, as that works better on some sites, but this catches most video sites. I could have sworn I had a browser limiting me to 4x at one point but I just cranked a YouTube video up to 8x on my Chrome-based browser without anything objecting. I'm not sure what the limit is, and it may depend on your computer.
https://twitter.com/TitanArumRBGE
Here's some more info on the carefully-managed conditions required to get the plant to thrive:
https://www.rbge.org.uk/news/amorphophallus-titanum/backgrou...