A flower blooms in Brooklyn and it stinks of rotting flesh

There’s a foul smell in Brooklyn, and it’s so rare that residents can’t wait to smell it.

A Brooklyn Botanic Garden flower that gives off a foul odor when it blooms every two to ten years is expected to burst forth this week, according to garden staff.

The corpse flower, native to Indonesia and known scientifically as Amorphophallus gigas, makes headlines in gardens around the world every time it blooms. As it prepares to unfurl its petals, the flower gives off a natural odor intended to attract scavenger beetles which eat dead animals.

The flower is expected to bloom by the end of the week, an event that will last only a few days, according to garden director Adrian Benepe.

Eric Schaller, a biology professor at Dartmouth College who studies corpse flowers, says flowering plants have a scent to behold.

“They smell rotting flesh in order to attract their pollinators,” he said.

Schaller knows this stench well: he slept next to dead flowers as part of his research and used thermal imaging to monitor the plants’ temperatures rising just before they bloom.

“At this point, it feels like you have a body,” Schaller said of the hot, stinky flowers.

The corpse flower can be found in the water house in the garden. After the garden posted a video of the plant on Instagram last week, dozens of commenters responded with plans to visit in hopes of catching it in flower.

“For me, part of it is also people’s fascination,” Schaller said. “Young children will be fascinated, but will run away when it smells too bad.”

The public can see and smell the corpse flower during the garden’s operating hours, which are Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The garden hosts its “winter weekdays” each year, which allows visitors to pay what they want to enter.