Thousands of visitors flocked to The Huntington Library, Art Gallery, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino on Monday as words spread like wildfires overnight: the world’s largest single-stem flower cluster is in full bloom, but only for a fleeting time.
Odora, the 26th Corpse Flower at The Huntington since 1999, commended attention not only with its imposing presence but with its pungent aroma that earned the plant its macabre nickname. Its towering upright column and outer covering unfurled around 5 p.m. Sunday to reveal an intricate velvety maroon interior, exuding a distinctive pungent smell that mirrors rotting meat, staff at the conservatory said.
“It took its time a bit,” Bryce Dunn, conservatory gardener at The Huntington, said Monday. “I was here until 8:30 p.m. yesterday, and it was about a quarter of the way open by the time I left and then it fully bloomed overnight.”
Before he left last night, Dunn measured Odora at around 93 inches. He estimated that the plant had pushed out another two inches just before it opened.
The smell is at its strongest when the plant is at peak bloom, which for Odora was around 2-4 a.m. Monday, Dunn said. However, the smell dwindles after that as the flower, which typically blooms for around 24 hours, starts to close during the day. As of Monday afternoon, the flower’s scent can only be detected within five feet of the plant, he added.
Despite the flower’s fading smell, the mesmerizing phenomenon has attracted numerous horticulture enthusiasts and curious families alike, who flooded in as soon as the conservatory opened its gates on Monday.
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“I think it smells like sardine ,” said Linda Tarpey, a Sylmar resident who was in line to see the plant on Monday. “When you open a can of sardines, that’s the smell I’m getting.”
Tarpey said she has been waiting to see the Corpse Flower bloom for 15 years.
“I missed it every time,” she said. “When we were here yesterday, it was closed. And then we realized, oh, it’s going to open, so we actually stayed the whole day and we ended up coming in, checking on it, every couple of hours.”
The Corpse Flower, scientifically known as the Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum), is native to the rainforest of western Sumatra, Indonesia.
It can take up to nearly a decade to store enough energy to bloom. Once it does, this remarkable plant can reach heights of up to 12 feet and blooms for just 24 hours every two to three years.
The pungent smell it exudes is meant to attract pollinators such as carrion beetles and flesh flies. There are actually hundreds of individual male and female flowers at the base of its spadix, or upright column, making it technically not the largest flower in the world, but rather a cluster of many flowers.
“But what’s special about them is I mean, it just looks alien,” Dunn said. “It looks so bizarre and it’s massive and it smells awful. So I think it really grabs people’s attention as soon as you hear about it. And then when you see it in person, it’s just something else entirely.”
Although the flower is only in bloom for around a day, plant enthusiasts who cannot witness the phenomenon in-person can still experience it through the Huntington Library’s livestream camera:https://huntington.org/corpse-flower
And if you miss the Odora, there is another chance to see a Corpse Flower in action. The Hungtington has another plant, named Scentennial, that is set to bloom sometime next week, Dunn said. This Corpse Flower earned its name by blooming during The Huntington’s 100th anniversary in 2019, he said.
SCNG Photojournalist David Crane contributed to this story
