Sometimes, you have to get weird.
For me, that most recently meant visiting a corpse flower! The Titan Arum. This is the world’s biggest flower (free-standing, non-branched, that is…if you count branched flowers…there’s one bigger). It is more widely known as “The Corpse Flower”. Nave to Sumatra in Southeast Asia, these things only bloom once a year, if that. When they do, they let out an odor that smells like dead things. At full bloom, the smell spreads as far as a half mile away.
While most flowers smell pretty to attract bees so that they swoop in and pick up the flower’s pollen and carry it from flower to flower…this flower doesn’t do quite that. This would be the goth flower that "has to be different"…because it attracts death and bugs that like death. So the bugs that normally land and feast on dead things, like roadkill, come to these flowers and move the pollen around like bees do for the regular flowers that don’t hate their parents.
Though the flowers stink…terribly, they are quite pretty, with a lot of greens and purples. And, unless you’re an NBA star, the flower is likely bigger than you. It can grow to over 10 feet tall! So, when you go up to them and stick your head in to “really get the smell”…try not to think of the giant man-eating flower from Little Shop of Horrors. This one won’t kill you, it’d just try to smell like you after you’ve already died!
I had heard about these weird flowers and wanted to take my sons to see one. Luckily, when I googled them, I found that there was one nearby at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Unfortunately, I had JUST missed one blooming. This was two years ago. I joined the botanical garden’s mailing list. And waited. Last year, nothing. The other day, though…I get an email. Subject line was “The Titan is Blooming.” I’ve gotten a lot of emails from the botanical garden…enough that this email could have gone overlooked. Usually, the emails are about plant sales. Even though the subject said nothing of “Corpse Flower,” I opened and read it just in case. And BAM, two years of waiting were done! I was excited. I waited in the driveway for my wife to arrive home with the boys. Once they did, I said “don’t get out of the car, we have a mission!”
We immediately drove to stand in line to see the foul flower … or offensive inflorescence. As we stood in line, the stench hit us. It was nasty! But the boys loved it. They thought it was hilarious and fun. Those of us that don’t constantly add stink to any room that we’re in found it interesting as well.
