Interesting Facts About The "Corpse Flower"

Don’t let it’s name fool you. The titan arum is a flower both exotic and beautiful. The problem is its fragrance. The intriguing flower’s not-so-pretty name comes from the fact that it stinks. It smells like rotting flesh.

One little stinky flower might not draw a lot of attention but the corpse flower is not a little flower. During its flowering phase, when it is most aromatic, the bloom can be more than eight feet (2.5 meters [m]) tall and ten feet (3 m) wide. That’s a pretty exotic statistic in and of itself but there’s so much more to this spectacular plant. Consider this:

• Its most formal name, Amorphophallus titanum, is Greek and it’s very descriptive. Its name can be broken down into three parts: amorphos (misshapen, without form), phallos (penis), and titan (giant).
• Sir David Attenborough made up the name titan arum when he featured the flower in his BBC television series, The Private Life of Plants. His thoughts were that the plant’s genus name (Amorphophallus) was a bit too risque for documentary TV.
• The world is dotted with botanical gardens that house a corpse flower or two but the only place they grow wild, in their native habitat, is in Sumatra, where they flourish in places where open grassland meets equitorial rain forest.
• In Sumatra, the plant is known as bunga bangkai - bunga (flower) and bangkai (cadaver or corpse).
• Another common name for the plant is carrion flower, thanks to its distinctive aroma and the way it attracts carrion-eating beetles and flesh flies, which are instrumental for the plant’s pollination.
• The flower is green on the outside but deep red inside, giving it the appearance of rotting meat.
• The corpse flower is the largest of the unbranched inflorescence, or flowering, plants in the world. Inflorescence refers to the complete flowerhead of a plant, including the stem, stalk, bract, and flower. In the case of the arum titan, there’s only one of each.
• The mature plant produces only one leaf, too, after the pollination process is complete and the flower dies back.
• The spadix, or spiked center part of the flower, is hollow and topped with an abundance of pollen. During the bloom phase, the spadix gets as warm as a living human body. The heat is thought to boost the fragrance of the flower and draw carrion-eating insects.
• Female plants bloom first, with male plants blooming a day or two after the females.
• Flowering is sporadic in the wild and incredibly rare in cultivation.
• The calla lily is a botanical cousin to the titan arum. Like the lily, the corpse plant stores energy in an underground corm, which provides nourishment during its dormant phase.
• The titan arum’s corm is the largest in the plant kingdom. Its weight averages 110 pounds (50 kilograms [kg]) but botanists at the Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew Gardens documented one that tipped the scales at 200 pounds (91 kg) when it was repotted after its dormant phase.
• The single leaf of the mature plant divides into three top sections, with each section sprouting many smaller leaflets.
• The plant’s leaf structure, leaflets and all, can get as tall as 20 feet (6 m) and spread to 16 feet (5 m) wide.
• At maturity, leaves last only one year, when a new leaf sprouts to replace the old one.
• An Italian botanist, Odoardo Beccari, was the first person to scientifically document the plant after studying it in its native Sumatran habitat in 1878.
• The first cultivated (growing from seed outside its native habitat) plant to bloom did so in 1889 at London’s Royal Botanic gardens at Kew.
• Since that first bloom in 1889, Kew Gardens has recorded more than 100 corpse flower blossoms.
• The second blooming at Kew, in 1926, drew such a throng of spectators that the police were required for crowd control.
• The first corpse flowers to bloom in the United States did so in 1937 and 1939 at the New York Botanical Garden.
• From 1939 until 2000, the titan arum was the official flower of the Bronx; today it’s the day lily.
• In any given year, about five corpse flowers will bloom in botanical gardens around the world.
• Since cultivation of this wildly exotic plant is so tricky and blooming so rare, seeds are reserved for only the most experienced professional and research gardeners throughout the world.

It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it stinks. We know it’s fascinated people for well over a hundred years but it’s probably been fascinating for many thousands of years before that. This plant is so rare and so exotic that every bloom makes headlines around the world and the only place to be sure to see a bloom from this mystifying beauty is at one of the many formal botanical gardens cultivating them. Many avid gardeners consider the sight a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, an event worthy of pilgrimage.

• Titan Arum at Kew Gardens (video)
• List of US Bloomings since 1937
• Return of the Titan at US Botanic Garden (with growth chart)
• University of California, Davis, Botanical Conservatory (with life cycle and corm)
• 2005 Bloom at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
• 2010 Bloom at the Milwaukee Public Museum (video and growth chart)
• Titan Arum Culture Overview