Sweet Bud~

On By cindy knokeIn Conservation, Flowers, GARDENING AT THE HOLLER, HOLLER HAPPENINGS, MY PHOTOGRAPHS, REVERIES, Tech Marvels, Wild Life

Why doth thou,

stink so much?

This is the flower bud of a corpse plant, named for the rancid corpse like smell the flower emits when it blooms. The smell attracts carrion beetles who pollinate the flower. The flower itself is the tallest in the world and can grow up to twelve feet in the wild. You can get a sense of how huge the bud is by comparing it to the exit door in the first photo, and the child in the second. It grows only on the island of Sumatra and is extremely endangered with about 1000 of the plants left in the wild. The flower bud grows six inches a day, and when it blooms, the flower only lasts for 48 hours. There are two of these flowers at The San Diego Botanic Garden. Watch the first one bloom in a time lapse video below filmed by Botanic Garden staff, appropriately enough, on Halloween:

This plant reminds me of the Saturday Sci Fi movies I used to watch as a kid! The plant takes about ten years to bloom, and will only bloom every four-ten years thereafter. It’s corm can weigh 339 pounds! As the flower begins to bloom, the temperature of parts of the flower rise by up to 10 degrees Celsius in a process called thermogenesis. The second bud at the San Diego Botanic Garden is due to bloom around Thanksgiving. The garden stays open until midnight during the bloom and 5000 people queued to see the first flower! People drive from out of state to see it.

Notice the detail of the bud petals. It looks a bit like a giant Bok choy!

This is the base of the first flower that bloomed. The female flowers are the red ones on the bottom, and the males are the brown ones above. It is the male flowers that rise in temperature during the bloom.

Cheers to you from the soon to bloom, very tall, and very stinky corpse flower~

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243 thoughts on “Sweet Bud~”

    1. I was wearing a mask, due to covid, not the corpse! 😉 I detected an odor, but not bad. I imagine it would be quite intense inside a green house, in full bloom, on a hot Holler night! And it is very hot here now.

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  22. Great post about our new plant overlords, Cindy. I feel for those living in Sumatra but it’s wonderful that you could see and photograph it for us. Best, Babsje

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    1. So your post was where I had seen this plant before! Thanks for the memory prompt. Your photos are wonderful! Only around five cultivated blooms occur each year, so your experience was remarkable დ

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  27. Such interesting details! I love botanical gardens. Gothenburg have a fantastic botanical garden that I am planning on visiting this spring. Thank you for sharing this interesting plant. Happy Friday!

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  38. That’s spectacular, dear Cindy. We didn’t know that such a plant exists.
    Thanks for sharing, especially the video.
    Wishing you a wonderful weekend
    The Fab Four of Cley
    🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

    Reply

    1. Here is what ‘Undark” journal says about this. “But fostering genetic diversity in the botanic gardens can be difficult, especially with finicky and rare plants. Like many plants, corpse flowers can reproduce in different ways. Sometimes, they reproduce asexually: a tuber-like bulge at the base of their stem, called a corm, grows large and eventually splits, producing multiple genetically identical plants. While this has effectively grown the raw number of corpse flowers in botanic gardens, it has done little for the population’s genetic diversity.

      Corpse flowers can also reproduce sexually, which requires pollination by insects — or, in botanic gardens, by humans wielding paint brushes. There’s no set schedule for a corpse flower to bloom; each plant takes a variable number of years and blooms unpredictably based on conditions such as heat, light, humidity, and other factors.

      To help breed on this unpredictable schedule, the Chicago Botanic Garden is creating a store of corpse flower pollen, which can be sent across the country when another specimen that isn’t closely related blooms. These targeted cross-pollination efforts could lead to more genetically robust offspring. While TREES has yet to lead to a crossing of corpse flowers, the Chicago Botanic Garden has used the methodology to strategically cross another plant called Brighamia insignis, also known as a cabbage-on-a-stick plant, which is critically endangered.”

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      1. Thanks. I had heard of the corpse plant before but I am really interested in what you have said about the botanic gardens. We visit them when we can, but I never thought of them much beyond being a site where plants were shown off. The behind the scenes science is really interesting.

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    1. It is amazing to see. We had one bloom at The Holler about two years ago. It attracted hordes of hummingbirds and butterflies. We have lots more, but they bloom only once as you know დ

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    1. You have the plant in Bonn and another in Munich. I love hearing from people who have seen it bloom in cities all around our small world. It only blooms about five times per year worldwide outside of Sumatra დ

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    1. Wonderful! I am hearing from people all over our small planet who live near cities who have the plant. The Kew Gardens were the first to propagate it outside of Sumatra დ

      Reply

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