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The King Kong of flowers

Big Bucky is a flower, called a Titan Arum (also called the "corpse flower" in its native Sumatra, because of its stench) that lives in a greenhouse at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. When it blooms, it releases a roadkill scent.

Botanists call the titan arum the "world's largest flower," but it really is an inflorescence, or collection of thousands of flowers. The titan arum are supposed to be rare and hard to cultivate, although researchers at UW-Madison have had four blooms on such flowers in the last five years.

The flowers bloom only about three or four times in their 40-year lives, when they slowly unfurl their green and purple spathe and release the stench, botanists say. This is the second bloom for 12-year-old Big Bucky.

The stench often is compared to road kill or rotting meat, and some visitors bring gas masks for protection. Fayyaz describes it as smelling "like a dead deer by the road that has been there for a few days" but says it's sweet to the beetles and flies that it attracts for pollination.

jon posted this at 8:11 AM
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