A corpse flower, affectionately named ‘Putricia’, is on display to the public as it prepares to bloom at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney on January 18 in Sydney. A amorphophallus titanum the flower is renowned for its nauseating odor reminiscent of rotting flesh.
Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
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Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
Staff and visitors to the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, Australia are hoping to see – and smell – a rare event that could happen at any time: the hatching of a giant. amorphophallus titanum, also known as “corpse flower”.
The flower’s Latin scientific name translates to “giant, misshapen penis.”
Visitors parade past, taking selfies of the flower as it rests on a raised platform protected by velvet ropes. The botanical garden also set up a live broadcast so that everyone had the chance to witness this memorable bloom. On Wednesday, some 3,000 people were watching online for “Puttricia,” as the plant has been nicknamed – a portmanteau of “putrid” and “Patricia.”
“People became very obsessed with it,” said Daniella Pasqualini, the garden’s horticultural development manager, as quoted in The Guardian. “She took a life of her own.”
The obsession is understandable. Sydney has been waiting 15 years for a bloom at the Royal Botanic Garden. It will also be easy to miss: the bloom will be gone, so to speak, in about 24 hours, experts say.
The plant is huge – measuring 5 feet tall. But it’s the aroma that really grabs people’s attention, says Emily Colletti, who tends the plant collection at the Missouri Botanical Garden. amorphophallus titanum.
When it finally blooms, the flower will smell “like rotting garbage or dead mice,” she says.
The plant is native to the rainforests of the Indonesian island of Sumatra and can grow up to 9 feet tall. Colletti says it blooms about every two to five years, up to five times during its life.
While there are “less than a thousand” plants left in the wild, “there are quite a few in cultivation,” says Colletti, adding that in some collections there can be 100 plants.
The Sydney specimen has “this wonderful reddish, brownish, brown to the edges of a frilly skirt, and that’s a good sign that it’s about to open,” she says, but cautions that it’s often difficult to say.
Despite the signs, things don’t always go as planned. “I actually looked at one…20 minutes before it started opening and you didn’t know it was going to open 20 minutes later.”
Two flowers bloomed in 2023 at the San Francisco Flower Conservatory and the San Diego Botanical Garden. A decade earlier, NPR reported on a plant that bloomed at the American Botanical Garden.
