Posted on 07/17/2002 6:37:25 AM PDT by dead
Encinitas, California: So many said they had never before come so far to smell something so bad.
The world's biggest and stinkiest flower is in full bloom in Southern California - something that's happened only 15 or so times in the United States.
The 1.35 metre amorphophallus titanum or titan arum, considered by some the plant kingdom's superstar, is drawing crowds to Quail Botanical Gardens curious to smell the odour that gives the plant its nickname, the corpse flower.
"It's the worst thing I've ever smelled," said nine-year-old Todd Fritz, who dropped to his knees yesterday and writhed on the ground in mock agony when he caught a whiff.
Dennis Gulyas, a self-described admirer of bizarre things, said the odour reminded him of an unventilated high school gym locker.
"It's the farthest I've gone to smell something that bad," said the San Diego man, who made a 32 km trip to the garden.
Native to Indonesia, the titan arum blooms only a few times in its life span and rarely blooms in cultivation. For eight hours, it emits a nauseating odour to attract pollinating, carrion-eating beetles.
"It's like the girl that's been waiting years to go to town and find her man and now she only has eight hours," said the plant's owner Jim Booman, who planted titan arum seeds seven years ago at his greenhouse in Vista.
The plan starts life as a small tuber, then shoots out a single tapered column that grows at the furious rate of up to 15 cm a day. It can reach heights of up to 2.7 metres before opening its cup-like petal, which looks like a giant turnip-coloured flower, but it is technically what is known as an inflorescence, a cluster of flowers. The actual flowers are hidden deep near the base of the column.
British naturalist Sir David Attenborough has called it "the greatest superstar of the botanical world".
The plant has been met with disbelief since its discovery in 1878 in the rain forests of Sumatra. On its first public display in London's Kew Gardens a few years later, the bloom revealed a massive phallus-like central column that shocked Victorian England.
The plant has been seen in bloom only about 15 times since its first US display in New York in 1937. About 63,000 people flocked to Huntington Library in San Marino when a titan bloomed in 1999.
"It's a textbook find of a plant," said Julian Duval, director of the Quail Botanical Gardens, where the titan arum began blooming yesterday.
"Everybody knows about it. Nobody's seen it."
A great deal remains unknown about the plant because it is difficult to find in the wild, and especially hard to find flowering. No one is sure how rare it is or how long it takes to bloom in the wild. A botanist scoured Indonesia for two weeks to find the seed that produced the plant that flowered in Encinitas.
Booman runs a business that raises unusual specimens to interest children in plants, but tending to the corpse flower was the most difficult challenge he has faced.
"Now, if it dies, I've finally seen it," he said.
AP
regards
"You silly. It's not bent and there are none of those little red sores."
MONICA
regards
regards
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