California: thousands flock to see pair of pungent corpse flowers bloom

Two corpse flowers have bloomed at a southern California research institution, where thousands of visitors had the rare chance to watch two of the world’s largest – and most odorous – plants flowering at the same time.

The two titan arums, named Odorysseus and Odora, attracted more than 7,000 people on Monday at the Huntington library, art museum and botanical gardens in San Marino, about 12 miles from downtown Los Angeles, after they bloomed over the weekend.

Each bloom lasts only about 24 to 48 hours, so once the towering plants began unfurling, the staff at the research facility notified the public on Sunday afternoon. The corpse flowers reached their peak overnight before slowly starting to close the following day. Visitors still got a chance to see the fleeting spectacle on Monday.

“They were enchanted by it,” said Brandon Tam, curator of the Huntington’s orchid collection. “People who lined up for three hours in our line just to see the corpse flowers for just a few minutes.”

A blooming corpse flower at the Huntington last year. Photograph: MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News/Getty Images

“People were curious, people were inspired,” Tam told the Guardian. “People started to fall in love, if they haven’t already been falling in love, with plants because of this poster child of a plant that has led people to better understand that plants have a life of their own.”

The excitement took over the space, so much so that advance tickets sold out by late Monday morning. The corpse flowers will be on display until early August.

The Titan Arum, commonly called the corpse flower, is famous for producing a pungent odor resembling rotting flesh. The smell attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies, which pollinate the endangered plant. The plant is a native of western Sumatra, Indonesia.

Don’t let the name fool you. The corpse flower is not a single flower, but a giant flowering structure composed of hundreds of tiny blooms. It can grow more than 12 feet tall and, once its brief flowering ends, collapses before entering a dormant period that can last years.

At the Huntington, titan arums have been cultivated for more than 25 years. It currently has more than 43 mature specimens, many coming from a plant successfully pollinated in 2002.

“In 2002, we pollinated a corpse flower, which produced hundreds of fruits and therefore hundreds of seeds that we would propagate”, Tam said.

The seedlings were also shared with other botanical gardens in the US to help conserve the endangered species, of which fewer than 1,000 are believed to remain in the wild.