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Image Courtesy U.S. Botanic Garden
The Day of the Dead may have found its official flower.
Thousands of people are flocking to Huntington Botanical Gardens near Los Angeles to catch a glimpse -- and a whiff -- of a rare event: the blooming of a corpse flower, which, when fully bloomed, emits a strong odor of rotting flesh.
The flower doesn't bloom every year -- and when it does, the event lasts only one or two days. The museum received the 40-pound stem of a corpse flower in 1999. It bloomed that year -- the first documented flowering of its kind in California -- and attracted 140,000 visitors, said Jim Folsom, Director of the Huntington Botanical Gardens, in a video on the museum's Web site. It bloomed again in 2002. Now, looky-loos are gathering 'round the blooming of its offspring, known by some as "the son of stinky."
In a way, the plant is not unlike the gentle version of a Venus Flytrap in The Little Shop of Horrors. For one thing, it's huge. Officially called the Amorphophallus titanum -- translating to "large, shapeless phallus" -- the flower is about the same height as Kobe Bryant, but can reach heights of 20 feet. At the museum in San Marino, it has been growing at a rate of four inches a day.
Like a Venus Flytrap, the plant's main goal is to attract flies -- hence the odor that more or less smells like rotting meat, foul to humans but, to a fly, it smells like lunch.
But unlike a Venus Flytrap, the corpse flower has no intention of digesting the fly, but rather simply wants to be pollinated. Oh, and it also doesn't say "feed me!"
