The mystery blooms of smelly ‘Corpse Flowers’
It’s the season of stink.
Nearly simultaneously, endangered “corpse flowers” are blooming this week in greenhouses from San Jose and Santa Cruz to Massachusetts and Ohio, thrilling big crowds who have waited for a glimpse of a tall, colorfully-hued plant that smells like poop.
Nobody can precisely predict when a “corpse flower,’ also known as a titan arum, will bloom. Its blossom is as rare as it spectacular. And this multi-location, synchronous blooming is rarer still.
While plants like the California poppy go from seed to flower in only two months, this tropical creature takes seven to ten years to mature enough to blossom — and then it only blooms briefly, once every three to five years.
Our local plants – in greenhouses at San Jose State University and UC Santa Cruz — will both be fully open and stinky early next week.
San Jose State’s plant is expected to bloom sometime between Sunday, July 24 and Tuesday, July 26. The UC Santa Cruz plant is on a similar trajectory.
Their full phallic splendor — many people think the flower resembles a penis — will last only 24 to 36 hours.
“It definitely seems like there are a lot of blooms in summer,” said SJSU Greenhouse Manager Lars Rosengreen. “But this plant is very, very unpredictable.”
Besides the Bay Area plants, corpse flowers are on the cusp of unfurling their smelly blooms this week in greenhouses at UC-Riverside, the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and a nursery in Georgetown, Massachusetts. Just last week, Missouri Botanical Garden’s plant wrapped up its show.
That’s a lot of corpse flowers.
To be sure, there are exceptions. The plants in San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers and San Marino’s Huntington Gardens bloomed in June. In April, a plant in Oklahoma attracted crowds from across the state, in a line that stretched as long as three hours.
UC Berkeley’s Botanical Garden does not expect any blooms this year. So it’s moving its collection into a renovated greenhouse to see if the plants are happier next year, said Garden curator Holly Forbes.
The life cycle of titan arum is a slow and curious one. It needs high humidity, fertilizer and rich soil.
Over a decade, it slowly develops from a seed into an underground “corm.” At SJSU, which annually repots and weighs the plant, the corm tilts the scales at about 100 pounds.
Every year, it produces a single giant leaf that resembles a green palm tree. Most years, that’s all.
There are three main clues to oncoming bloom. A spike emerges, quickly growing several inches per day — then suddenly slows. Then little leaves at the base of the spike begin to shrivel and dry. Finally, a frilly leaf called a spathe, tightly wound around the spike, loosens its grip.
The plant actually gets hot, approaching the 98.6 degrees of the human body. That’s caused by a chemical process, generated by the uncoupling of proteins in the plant’s cells.
Then a glorious deep maroon flower emerges – with a foul stench.
“It smells like a very large pile of very rotten meat with an overlay of (poop), some dead fish and a few other things,” said Martin Quigley, executive director of UC Santa Cruz Arboretum and Botanic Garden.
“It is so nasty a smell that some people feel weak, even nauseous,” he said.
Birds, bees and butterflies have no interest. Rather, the flower attracts swarms of dirty flies, at night, in a gruesome display that earned the moniker “corpse flower.”
It’s a ploy: The insects mistake it for a dead body, the perfect home for maggots.
“They think they’ve just hit the biggest day in the casino. But it’s just a giant plant,” said Quigley. The flies hang around for awhile and then travel on, he said, unwittingly carrying the plant’s pollen with them.
Then the bloom fades. The plant is depleted, and must recover before it blooms again.
How could a complex multi-step life cycle become seemingly synchronized?
“We really don’t know for sure,” said SJSU botany professor Ben Carter. “There haven’t been many that have bloomed over the course of the last century, especially in North America.”
The plant is so rare that there’s been little research; until recently, there were only about 500 recorded blooms. It is native to the rainforests of western Sumatra in Indonesia, where farming is destroying habitat. Until recently, few domestic specimens were grown. That changed in the 1990s, when seeds were gathered in the wild and distributed widely among botanical gardens and private collectors.
So most U.S. plants are young, and are just now reaching maturity.
The time it takes to recover after blooming, then bloom again, will be based on growing conditions, said Quigley and Carter.
They aren’t linked by some weird psychic network. “They don’t chat with each other,” said Quigley.
Instead, it’s likely they’re picking up on subtle seasonal cues, they said. While humans enjoy dim lights and soft music to get in the mood, plants may be responding to our shortening days.
“It’s just after solstice,” said Quigley. “That may be the trigger.”
But even then, there’s no guarantee.
Earlier this week, the San Antonio Zoo — and fans across the city — were on a livestreamed “bloom watch.” As thousands of viewers tuned in to watch, the staff smelled a faint fragrance. Then hopes were dashed.
The plant’s spike sagged, then collapsed. Hopes are now pinned on next year.
The smelly plant, said Zoo president Tim Morrow, offers “a life lesson.”
“Even though you may not succeed on your first attempt, it doesn’t mean you are a failure,” he said. “You can still bloom in the future!”