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| Corpse flower’ blooms: The wait is over: The large, stinky flower that smells like rotting flesh is in bloom at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington |
WASHINGTON — The wait
is finally over for visitors who've been yearning for a whiff of a giant flower
that smells oddly like rotting flesh.
Titan arum, a giant rainforest plant that's been dubbed the “corpse
flower” for its terrible smell, finally started blooming Sunday afternoon with
the U.S. Botanic Garden next to the Capitol. Experts have been anticipating its
bloom for over a week and extended your garden’s hours for visitors every
evening.
Garden officials expect “peak smell” to occur early Monday morning, and the flower
to remain open on an estimated 24 to two days. Then it will quickly collapse on
itself. The past corpse flower to bloom at the U.S. Botanic Garden is at 2007.
The titan arum is indigenous to the tropical rainforests of
Sumatra, Indonesia. It was first discovered in 1878. Corpse flowers also have
recently bloomed at facilities in Ohio and in Belgium.
“Just in the same way
a lovely smelling plant, as being a rose, is attracting a bee or a different
sort of insect using what we would think about good smell, to pollinate it,
this type of plant has got the strategy of utilizing a horrible, fetid smell to
draw in insects, ” said Ari Novy, the public programs manager on the garden. “So
this plant is basically tricking those sorts of insects into coming, developing
a party interior of your plant as well as the flower and pollinating it, then
moving forward.”
The titan arum growing in the U.S. Botanic Garden is around
10 years old, and this is its first flower. It began using a seed the
dimensions of a lima bean and it has grown several ft . Tall. The plants bloom
on irregular, unpredictable schedules, Novy said. A fashionable, humid climate
provides the ideal conditions for that plant to create a flower.
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