Originally published at: I visited that rare blooming corpse flower at the abandoned gas station in Alameda, California | Boing Boing
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I’m glad you got to experience it! Those stinky things are quite amazing, and I give all credit to any grower with the patience and space to bloom one.
Showing it in an abandoned gas station is also a brilliant move. Usually their smell will linger in a greenhouse for a long time after the blossom has expired, and that’s not conducive to enjoying your other plants.
BTW, the headline is quite confusing. I was trying to figure out how a titanum could possibly be growing successfully in a particular abandoned gas station without being stolen, destroyed by vandals, or killed by uncontrolled weather.
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Man, that thing is HUGE!
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Never again. I could not get that trash diaper smell out of my head for days, I would just randomly smell it. It’s an amazing feat of gardening, but for my money, best enjoyed at a distance.
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Still too close.
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That bad, huh!
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There are a lot of orchids (and other plants, like the titanum) whose blossoms color themselves to look like rotting flesh, or whose smells are absolutely rancid. (I don’t think there’s a single bulbophyllum that smells “good”, but the flowers are fascinating.)
The reason is simple: they attract flies to serve as pollinators, the same way sweet smelling flowers attract bees.
Some people specialize in entire collections of foul smelling plants. Many orchid growers I know keep one or two in their collection just for fun, and for public displays. “Hey, you want to smell this flower?” That joke never gets old.
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comments link seemed borked a moment ago.
It’s kind of crazy how little bulb/root it takes to make that huge flower that just falls off afterward, not to mention the tree(s) that sprout in the meantime.
Yeah. I’ve smellled a lot of bad things, but this was by far the worst. And it really stayed with me, for days.
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