Last time, the corpse flower bloomed at the United States Botanic Garden Conservatory in July 2013.
Plant lovers in a Windy City are enjoying a singular materialization of a remains flower in bloom. The Chicago Botanic garden’s administration has provided all the visitors crowding it these days with seven experts that would explain the bloom’s evolution. The garden authorities have moved Spike to a different greenhouse where she will be nurtured to bloom in 3-5 years.
“Head to the Garden now to see (and smell!) the extremely rare phenomenon of a corpse flower in full bloom”, the Chicago Botanic Garden announced on its website. It was not actually Alice but a larger corpse flower named Spike that the botanical garden expected to bloom. The long lines, the media circus-all waiting for the foul smell that was promised to be the world’s largest and smallest flowering plant.
Botanic Garden workers pollinated Alice on Tuesday morning with the help of pollen from a titan arum that bloomed in August in Denver and also from Spike.
Energy is crucial in this plant’s lifecycle as high levels of energy are needed to produce the “noxious” smell that is such an attraction to horticulturist across the globe. Carrion beetles and flies that usually feed on dead animals are attracted by the corpse flower’s notoriously bad smell. These rare plants are native to the rainforests of Indonesia. Soon she will start shrinking in size. A forced opening with just a slight odor was what visitors were greeted with after waiting hours to see the corpse flower. They rarely bloom even in the wild. None of them realized that the garden was so close to having one more corpse flower bloom.
Why does it smell so stinky? Because of a combination of indole, trimethylamine, benzyl alcohol, isovaleric acid, dimethyl disulfide, and dimethyl trisulfide.
