The corpse flower heats itself to body temperature to spread the smell of death.
The titan arum from Sumatra produces a flower spike over three metres tall that blooms for barely a day or two and smells of rotting meat. It first flowered in cultivation at Kew in 1889, and a blooming in a botanic garden can still draw thousands of visitors.
Amorphophallus titanum grows wild only in the rainforests of western Sumatra. For most of its life it is a single, gigantic leaf, the size and shape of a small tree and up to 4.7 metres tall, which feeds a huge underground tuber; at over 90 kilograms, that tuber is the largest known in any flowering plant. Each year the leaf dies back and a new one grows. Only when the tuber has stored enough energy, which can take ten years from seed, does the plant send up an inflorescence instead.
What looks like one colossal flower is actually a spike, the spadix, wrapped in a frilled, bell-shaped spathe, green outside and deep maroon within. Hidden at its base are rings of hundreds to thousands of tiny male and female flowers. The female flowers open first, to prevent self-pollination, and the whole performance lasts only 24 to 36 hours.
During that time the spadix warms to around 37°C. The heat helps vaporise a stench, strongest from late evening to midnight, when carrion beetles and flesh flies are active. Chemists have identified compounds reminiscent of garlic, rotting fish, sweaty socks, limburger cheese and faeces, and the smell can carry up to 800 metres. The warmth and the meat-like colour complete the illusion of a carcass.
The Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari described the plant in 1878 and sent seeds to Europe. A single seedling at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, became the first to flower in cultivation, in 1889. It remains difficult for amateurs to grow, and bloomings are events: New York's first, in 1937 and 1939, led to it being named the official flower of the Bronx. The gentler name 'titan arum' is said to have been coined for David Attenborough's 1995 series The Private Life of Plants, because the scientific name, from Greek words meaning 'giant misshapen phallus', seemed too rude for television.
Source: Wikipedia — Amorphophallus titanum · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
