How far would you go to see a flower that stinks of rotting flesh? Pretty far one would think, if one, it is one of the largest flowers on earth, two, It is an endangered species that blooms only once every few years, say four to 10 years, and three, the bloom lasted only 24-36 hours.

For me, it was no more than a five-mile drive down the road to see the famed “corpse flower”.

Corpse flower — so-called because it has the odour of rotting flesh — is a flowering plant of the family Araceae, formally/botanically called Amorphophallus titanum or titan arum. First discovered and described for the world by Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari in 1878, it is native to Sumatra, Indonesia, where it is called bunga bangkai — bunga means flower, bangkai means corpse/cadaver/carrion. Reaching up to 10 feet in height, it has the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world — and it stinks to high heavens.

Why the stink? Experts have identified different molecules responsible for the stench, including dimethyl trisulfide (found in spoilt cheese), trimethylamine (rotting fish) and isovaleric acid (sweaty socks). The smell, colour and even temperature of corpse flowers are meant to attract pollinators. Dung beetles, flesh flies and other carnivorous insects that typically eat dead flesh flock to corpse flowers for a feast.

The blooming of the corpse flower is quite an event because it happens so rarely and unpredictably. The blooming is not seasonal; instead, it occurs when there is sufficient energy stored in a huge underground stem called a “corm” — and then it goes…BLOOM! It takes years for a single corpse flower to gather enough energy to begin its bloom cycle.

Blooming requires very special conditions, including warm day and night temperatures and high humidity, making botanic gardens well suited to support the event. So many botanical gardens around the world nurture the corpse flower and its blooming becomes a local event. In recent months, corpse flowers have bloomed in botanical gardens as far apart as St.Louis, Missouri, San Antonio, Texas and Warsaw, Poland, drawing crowds in thousands. The one in Missouri even had a name — Morty, probably short for mortician.

While more than 100 corpse flowers thrive in botanical gardens across the world (none in India, as best as I know),  they are listed as “endangered” on the International Union for Conservations of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Plants. Fewer than 1,000 individuals are thought to be left in the wild, according to the United States Botanic Garden.

Our local celebrity in Washington DC bloomed this week, and we (me with wife and kids) hared across to the National Botanical Garden for a dekko. By the time we got there, it was already folding up and the stench had dissipated.

Apparently, the stink is at its worse between midnight and 4 am in the dead of the night, so to say.

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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