Would you line up for hours to catch a whiff of something that smells like death? Right now, that’s what people are doing in Victoria.
It seems unbelievable, but there is a plant, aptly named the ‘corpse flower’, that is said to smell like a rotting corpse, and it’s currently blooming in Geelong Botanic Gardens. The corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanum or titan arum, only flowers every seven to 10 years, and it has a very small window of 48 hours before it will wither and die.
So, for the next day or so, Geelong Botanic Gardens is keeping its doors open for visitors to come, see and smell the putrid stench! There’s even a live stream for those who can’t make the trip:
Geelong Botanic Gardens released a statement on their ‘Corpse plant in bloom‘ page late last night about the icky smell:
“The corpse plant is in full bloom and has started stinking, too, which is part of its famous pollination process. Visitors have said the smell reminds them of a ‘stinky pond’ or a ‘dead mouse’. Come on down to the Geelong Botanic Gardens to take in the plant with all your senses.” It explains that the plant will bloom for 48 hours, and should be complete by 7pm on November 12.
You may be questioning how Geelong actually got a hold of one of these huge, smelly plants. It was gifted by the Botanic Gardens of South Australia several years ago, but this plant actually hails from the tropics of Indonesia. Amorphophallus titanum only grows in Sumatra and Java, and has become endangered due to logging and habitat loss.
The excitement around such a bad-smelling plant is not just for its scent, but for its rarity as well. After two days of blooming (and smelling disgusting!), the titan arum flower will wither and die. The rest of the plant will retreat underground for 10 years before starting the whole process again.
So, unsurprisingly, people in Geelong are lined up out the door to get a whiff of the rotting flesh smell of the titan arum. The question is, would you go to so much effort for something so stinky?
Why does the corpse flower smell so bad?
It may seem like a deterrent or a way to protect from predators, but the smell of the corpse plant is actually meant to draw in pollinators, specifically carrion-eating insects. And the best way to draw this type of insect in is by replicating something dead; from the smell to the colour, which is red and congealed-looking. The carrion beetles and flies will then feed and lay eggs into the rotten flesh of the titan arum.
What does a corpse flower smell like?
A corpse flower is said to smell like a number of gross things, including dead animals, rotten eggs and cheese, and sweat. This plant draws in pollinators with its smell, which is made up of several smelly molecules:
- dimethyl disulfide (garlic)
- dimethyl trisulfide (rotten flesh)
- methyl thioacetate (sulfur)
- isovaleric acid (cheese or sweat)
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