Denver Botanic Gardens readies for debut bloom of corpse flower, smells of ‘rotting flesh’

IT’S huge, strange and smells like a rotting carcass. This isn’t any normal flower, and for the first time in fifteen years, it’s about to bloom.

Supplied Editorial corpse plant

UPDATE: The corpse flower started blooming overnight and is expected to last 12-48 hours. According to Denver Botanic Gardens spokeswoman Erin Bird, it smells like “a “dirty diaper, spoiled milk & a mouldy aquarium”.

Corpse flower update: member viewing has begun and the public can come at 9 a.m. #StinkyDBG pic.twitter.com/9IWfhbKh0o

— DenverBotanicGardens (@Botanic) August 19, 2015

Earlier: THERE’S a strange nocturnal gathering going on in Denver right now. Dozens of people are meeting in a city glasshouse, with their cameras and sick bags ready, waiting for a stench so bad it has been compared to rotting flesh.

The smell will come from the first bloom of the city’s Corpse Flower, a huge plant native to Sumatra that has taken fifteen years to mature.

Once the dormant flower begins to blossom, visitors will only have 12 — 48 hours to see and smell it before it wilts.

So unappealing in smell and sight is this organism, its scientific name — Amorphophallus Titanum — translates to “misshapen giant penis”.

Said to be one of the world’s oldest and largest species, this plant is the talk to the town, and people from near and far are eagerly awaiting the rare opportunity to smell its wicked stench, which has drawn comparisons to rotting flesh, sweaty socks and mothballs.

For close to a decade the Denver Botanic Gardens (DBG) has been slowly and steadily nurturing the corpse flower in preparation for its debut bloom, which can take up to twenty years. The DBG acquired the flower when it was in its infancy at eight-years-old.

And now, finally, the time is upon us.

“We were expecting it to bloom last Sunday,” Denver Botanic Gardens spokeswoman Erin Bird told news.com.au.

“Growth is slowing, it’s kind of like a first pregnancy or birth and we don’t know what to expect.

“Some of them have bloomed in the afternoon, some in the middle of the night, but we have no idea what to expect.”

The corpse flower is drumming up quite the interest in Denver.

Denver Botanic Gardens’ corpse plant currently stands at 157cm.

WHY DOES IT SMELL SO BAD?

“It’s clearly, to me, the odour of a dead mammal, as opposed to a fish,” Paul Licht, the director of the University of California’s botanical garden said of his own experience with the corpse flower earlier this year.

“Or maybe a dead rat. A big dead rat. Or a dead cow.

“It’s a fascinating flower, and it stinks. But in a way that somehow appeals to people. People go to horror movies to be scared, right? Well they go to see this flower to be made nauseous.”

The plant’s overpowering smell, which can occur in “infrequent blasts”, helps to attract pollinators like beetles and carrion flies, who are drawn to the whiff of dead carcass.

Attracted by the corpse flower’s burgundy interior, which mimics the carcass of rotting flesh, the insects carry pollen from the flower on their feet and wings and help to spread its seeds.

“[The smell] is a trick,” said Ms Bird.

“There’s a type of beetle and fly that just mainly eat animal flesh so they’re on the hunt for that and think the plant is that.

“[The smell] will permeate quite a ways, the smell is the most intense when it first opens,” Ms Bird told news.com.au.

“If it opens in the afternoon they have said it does take your breath away and make you gag. As a joke we’re going to have little barf bags that have fun facts about the plant.”

The smell is only produced for a short time during its bloom, so blink, and you’ll miss it.

“It smells bad to us, but it smells great to flies,” Mo Fayyaz, the greenhouse and garden director at the University of Wisconsin’s department of botany, told National Geographic in 2013.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Over an extended period of time the corpse flower can grow as big as a human, currently Denver’s corpse flower sits at 157cm, but others are known to have grown up to 3 metres.

The species blooms rarely — with many plants only putting on a show every decade or so.

When a flower is ready to bloom, it heats its flower to over 37 degrees celsius, which helps the foul smell permeate its native habitat.

After its famous odour wafts away, the flower will collapse and restart its cycle.

When it’s finally time, its bloom unfurls into a blood-red flower, and its stench can be detected up to an acre away.

About 800 individual flowers are wrapped up underneath the corpse flower’s outer layer.

Once “Stinky” blooms, visitors will have to be quick, they’ll have 12 to 48 hours to view and smell the flower before it wilts.

“People are drawn to the corpse flower for many reasons: the anticipation of the unknown, the extremely short-lived opportunity to see and smell it, the human interest in the obscure, and that it could be a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Ms Bird told news.com.au.

Peeee-uw: John Catlan at his Jacobs Well home with a corpse plant flowering in his backyard. Picture: Campbell Scott.

“Spud” the corpse plant flowered at the Cairns Botanic Gardens in 2013.

WHERE DOES IT ORIGINATE?

The corpse flower is native to the rainforests of western Sumatra in Indonesia, growing on hillsides between 120m to 365m above sea level.

Sadly, the species is under threat from widespread deforestation, with the International Union for Conservation of Nature classifying it as “vulnerable”, one notch away from endangered.

Watch the corpse flower bloom without the worry of the smell at the Denver Botanic Gardens website.