LIVE: Be There to See Rare Corpse Flower Bloom for 1st Time in 9 Years
In Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the star-crossed girl famously claims that names are less important than something’s essence, saying, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.”
Of course, sometimes names really do get to the center of something. Consider the terribly titled corpse flower, a giant 10-to-15-foot-tall plant that smells just as gross as you might imagine.
When it blooms, it emits an odor more appropriate for a crime scene or a slaughterhouse than a garden. The cloying stench of rotting meat clings to its flower, and its not without purpose.
Carnivorous insects such as dung beetles serve as the corpse flower’s primary pollinators, which is why the plant releases its titular stink.
The flower’s color also apes the tint of decomposing flesh, and it can even approach the same temperature as a human body.
But those aren’t the oddest things about the plant: Perhaps the strangest thing about it is how rarely it blooms.
Most corpse flowers only boom once a decade, and some can take even longer than that.
And the very rarity of its blooms means waiting for it to flower has become something of a (very patient) spectator sport.
Take Rosie, a corpse flower currently in residence at the Tucson Botanical Gardens. Nine-year-old Rose is finally ready to show her stinky bloom to the world.
This particular corpse flower is something of an anomaly. It only stands at a modest three feet, and experts thought it wouldn’t send out a flower for three more years.
Still, it’s a rare enough occurrence that the Tucson Botanical Gardens has put up a live webstream so people can watch the exact moment Rosie flowers. So far, the stream has attracted visitors from the world over, including Australia.
People logging on to their computers to watch live video of a plant probably sounds a bit odd. It makes more sense, though, once you understand a bit more about corpse flower biology.
The blooms only last 36 hours at most. So if you don’t catch it quick, the noxious flower is gone forever!
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