By Angus Dalton
Putricia has reached the climax of her necrotic bloom when I arrive at her bedside at 10pm. The corpse flower’s glasshouse smells of a cadaver on the turn. And the woman who raised her, Alyse Baume, has stabbed the short, savage blade of a pruning shear into her back.
The first blooming of an endangered Amorphophallus titanum at the Royal Botanic Garden in 15 years has summoned thousands of Sydneysiders to this steamy greenhouse, like the buzzing flies and beetles hypnotised by Putricia’s rot. She’s spawned an online community of almost a million livestream viewers.
Right place, right time, terrible stench: behind the curtain of a corpse flower’s pollination.Credit: Angus Dalton
Now, the critical moment has arrived. Every flower’s bloom is, after all, an invitation to procreate. It is time for Putricia’s pollination – and it just so happens someone is needed to hold aside her plush velvet curtain.
I step forward into the glitz of spotlights and phone torches bathing Putricia. Reeling in her dizzying putrescence and squinting in the lights, I hold the curtain aloft and try not to breathe as Baume starts to saw.
She cuts a square the size of a drinks coaster in the back of Putricia’s skirt. The sliced-out portions resemble watermelon rind. “It’s like a fairy door,” observes John Siemon, director of horticulture at the Royal Botanic Gardens.
The square hole has revealed a ring of hundreds of black stamen-like structures. These are Putricia’s female flowers. Another ring of male flowers is hunched above; they will blossom hours later.
“Welcome, you’ve arrived at the perfect time,” an attendant purrs into a microphone as crowds of late-night viewers spill in. “Blessed be the bloom.”
A small zip-locked bag of pollen is produced. Even though they possess male and female reproductive parts, corpse flowers rarely self-pollinate. This pollen was donated by a corpse flower that bloomed in Queensland and put on ice for this very moment.
The gardens’ curator manager, Jarryd Kelly, clasps the bag in his hands, warming the pollen. He peels apart the ziplock and tips it upside down. Specks of ochre ambrosia fall into a petri dish.
The energy is jokey (“Anyone got a credit card?”), but there’s a hot, tense undercurrent. We are Playing It Cool with dilated pupils. Hundreds of murmuring punters flood around the operation. The air is warm and wet, Sumatran-style. Everyone is sweaty. Top buttons pop.
Amid it all, Putricia sprawls on the lush plinth of her boudoir, fronds akimbo with all the sultry confidence of the most famous girl in this city. She’s misted by steam, green spadix erect, anointed with fragrance distilled from the juice of a hundred festering bins.
Open on Siemon’s phone is the corpse flower Kama Sutra: an academic paper called On the thermogenesis of the Titan arum. The paper stipulates when Putricia will hit peak heat and putridity. Siemon has tracked a building heat spike, and it seems we are approaching the pocket of perfect fertility – which coincides with the full force of her stench.
The plumes come in waves, like Putricia is periodically pressing the bulbous pump of a cursed perfume. The revolting geysers are thrust forth by the thermogenic (heat-producing) action of her stewing core, which is approaching 30 degrees.
Your correspondent, on the left, takes a peek at the livestream after being accidentally roped into Putricia’s pollination.Credit: Youtube
Just last year, Dartmouth College scientists analysed the fertile flesh of a corpse flower and discovered amino acids that serve as the precursor of a chemical called putrescine. This compound is produced in decomposing animals and is responsible for the stench of putrefying flesh.
Their conclusion: Putricia and her kin may mimic death on a molecular level.
Eyes are watering, and noses are pinched, but this moment must be seized. Two paint brushes serve as the instruments of pollination; one stubby, one attached to a slender black metre-long pole.
Baume douses the short paintbrush in the pollen and reaches through the square portal, gently stroking Putricia’s sticky pollen-seeking stigmas. Then she goes in from the top with the longer pole, attempting to pollinate as many internal flowers as she can. (Baume is both a horticulturalist and a make-up enthusiast. She was born for this.)
This would normally be the job of a fly or beetle smothered in pollen. Pairs of pollinating insects, drunk on the scent of roadkill, often mate themselves within a corpse flower’s spathe.
The paintbrushes withdraw. A smattering of applause. The deed is done.
Putricia has the capacity to produce 400 seeds – a number that rivals how many of her kin remain in the wild in her native Sumatra. Putricia’s heat will soon spike again as her male flowers bloom, and the pollen will be gathered.
We mightn’t know for weeks if the intimate pollination operation worked.
Before I let the velvet curtain fall, Putricia’s attendants gaze at her for a moment and, cloaked in the stench of death, do as we always have: hope for new life.
Through Putricia’s pollination portal.Credit: Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney
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