...But not behind the arras.
The largest flower known today (early July, 1999) is that of Rafflesia arnoldi, a parasitic plant that grows in Sumatra. It is about one meter across, and is apparently pollinated by mice. (I bet they do it at night, too.) The world is a very strange place.
The longest known branched inflorescences are about six meters long. One of them belongs to a palm tree the name of which I forget, and I don't recall the other. (You can find information in Deni Bown's The Aroids, if I recall correctly.)
This leaves the longest (or rather, tallest) unbranched inflorescence, which is that of Amorphophallus titanum, a rather peculiar bulb that is endemic to Sumatra. (Along with Rafflesia arnoldi and the Giant Rat, right? I don't know what it is about Sumatra, but the place must be quite something.)
Amorphophallus turns out to be a remarkably large genus. As far as I know there are either about seventy of them, or about a hundred seventy; I have heard both numbers, and haven't had time to check. Doug Ewing, who runs the Botany Department's greenhouse at the University of Washington, has perhaps a dozen or two of them. Early last week he flowered A. bulbifer, which has a lovely salmon-colored inflorescence perhaps a foot tall or a little less. Doug said it smelled like the stuff they put in natural gas so you'll know if you have a leak. I missed it; got there about two days after the flower opened, and smelled essentially nothing.
I have been eating these nifty Japanese "yam jelly" things for over a year now. They've changed the warning, but it originally began about like the title of this section. Konnyaku ("Batake" seems to mean the same thing as "Farm", and appears to be part of the brand name) is remarkably elastic, and if you accidentally suck the entire thing out of the little heart-shaped portion pack and it lodges in your throat, you are definitely in deep trouble. I mention Konnyaku because that word seems to be equal to "konjac", which is the name of another species of Amorphophallus. This one is reasonably hardy, and if the summers in Seattle were warm enough we could grow it outdoors here; but they aren't, and the few hardy souls who dare to grow it are stuck with it inside their houses. This becomes particularly poignant when it decides to flower.
I don't have personal experience of A. konjac, but I do know that it is not pleasant. (I think I heard somebody say something about rotting diapers...) In fact, as far as I'm aware the entire genus is pollinated by flies and carrion beetles, and all the inflorescences have aromas that tend to be unpleasant to humans. To a carrion beetle, of course, they're about like a dinner bell. Konjac produces an inflorescence that can easily stand five feet tall, but some of that is the stalk that supports it. Even so, it is a large flower, and a very stinky one.
In addition to various plants of A. konjac, A. bulbifer, and so on, Doug Ewing has several husky little plants of A. titanum. I think he started with a few seeds, and has successfully divided at least one of the resulting bulbs. In any case, his largest bulb (which weighs about 80 pounds, or did before it flowered) is now about six years old, and when it came out of dormancy a month or two back, it put up an inflorescence instead of a leaf.
This is cause for some rejoicing: A. titanum is little known; it is not all that common even in Sumatra, and is decidedly uncommon in cultivation. I believe it has been flowered in captivity (as it were) only nine times during this century, and never before west of St. Louis on this continent.
The way these things typically work is that they put up a single leaf, which is multiply compound and actually looks rather like a small tree. When the leaf dies, either the bulb becomes dormant, or it puts up another leaf. If it becomes dormant you must stop watering it, or it rots. You then get to wait until it jolly well decides to wake up. Eventually it gets big enough, and then it occasionally puts up an inflorescence instead of a leaf. In Sumatra, this probably takes a decade or more, but Doug Ewing really knows what he's about with plants. It is no surprise that he's in charge of the Botany Dept greenhouse. The various shapeless putzes (that is, after all, what "Amorphophallus" means) are not the only remarkable things he has growing there. During the last few days I have smelled Victoria cruziana (a water-lily with pads about two feet across) and about sixteen amazing orchids. There is also a large and lovely cactus and succulent collection. Doug is doing very well with things like Welwitschia, which are not exactly easy.
I've known about A. titanum for several decades, but have never had the opportunity to sniff it until now. (In Sumatra it is apparently known as "corpse-flower".) When a bulb at Kew Gardens flowered a few years ago, however, it wasn't particularly stinky, and about 30,000 people were disappointed. Doug's plant, even though it never fully opened and the inflorescence lasted less than a day, was entirely satisfactory. I was in the room with it for up to 45 minutes at a time, and it made my eyes water and sting. Bob Beer stayed next to it, explaining it to people, for about as long, and was obliged to go outside and refresh himself by sniffing a heliotrope for a while: he actually began to feel sick. (Doug's younger son, Simon, who also did yeoman service telling people about the plant and helping his father, was a bit smarter about it than Bob and I were; he took more frequent breaks, and never actually seemed to turn even slightly green.) People could smell it well out into the main hallway of the greenhouse, and even out to the street, which is quite a few yards away.
Unfortunately, the flower had already begun to collapse when I finally brought my camera; the day before that it was fully six feet tall, if you don't discount the stalk (which was very short). This particular inflorescence was a lovely bing- cherry color inside, a little darker than the darker of the two you can see at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens Web page. Doug apparently suspects that the "flower" collapsed so quickly because the humidity in that room got too low. If he's lucky the bulb will stay alive, and perhaps it will flower again after it puts up another leaf. (That seems to be a common pattern.) Even if not, he has several more that are coming along nicely, and within a few years he's going to have another shot at it. I hope he gets a chance to pollinate the next one.
Here I am with the blossom, the day after it tried to open. You can't quite get the color from this scan, but some of its richness should be apparent. (Click the small image if you want a bigger one, then use the ol' "Back" button in the usual way.)
(Image added some time later, after I managed to get it processed & printed & scanned & up here...)
So, anyway, I have sniffed this thing rather extensively now. It smelled like a dead rat.
A very large and extremely dead rat. (Ahem.)
It was warm, too: like skunk-cabbage and many other related
plants, this one heats up when it is receptive. If you held
your hand between the spadix and the spathe, you could feel
a bit of warm air rising. I heard that someone brought in a
thermocouple probe, and measured about six celsius degrees
down inside the "flower". That's not a huge rise, especially
compared with skunk-cabbage, which can melt a hole in snow;
but it's certainly substantial.
Pseudo-mailto: jon (you know) bazilians (punkt) org Last modified: Mon Jan 29 20:30:29 PST 2001