What’s All the Stink About?

Today, in hot pursuit of a journalism goldmine, I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in order to smell the Amorphophallus titanium, a.k.a. corpse flower. A corpse flower is a unique flowering plant from Sumatra that blossoms only once every few to ten years with a single giant flower that can be three to seven feet tall and three feet wide. Size isn’t this bud’s only talent. It also stinks of dead meat. This enticing quote from the garden’s website says it all: “Notable not only for the stature of its bloom, the well-named corpse flower also produces a revolting stench of putrefaction.”

I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to get some good tape for my radio show of crowds of people groaning from the stench and botanists speechifying about how glorious this stinker is. Sadly, I was a day late and an odor short of a great radio story. The corpse flower only reeked for 8 hours and I missed the window by an entire day. Who’d have thought that such a veggie beastie would be so shy? No worries, because the flower was still impressive in height, though not all stinky. Check out the pics:

Me and “Baby” the corpse flower

Close up of “Baby”

Water lilies looking

Children feeding the unruly horde of killer koi