The Smell of the Corpse Flower

The Corpse Flower, Amorphophallus titanum, is the stinkiest flower in the world and what does it smell like? You guessed, a rotting corpse.

More commonly called titan arum which, you must admit, sounds a lot better, it can grow up as high as three metres, that's ten feet, and it only flowers once in about every seven years. Perhaps that's just as well.

It's a striking, strident plant, related to the Calla lily, but definitely not my choice for a display in the average suburban garden. I'd make a hefty bet that it wouldn't be your choice either.

We delight in flowers. We admire their graceful shapes, their entrancing variety of colours and, most of all, we enjoy their enchanting fragrance. But flowers couldn't care less what we thought of them. Everything about a flower, especially the scent, is fine-tuned over millennia to attract pollinators.

The corpse flower does its job beautifully, attracting those flies and beetles which lay their eggs in dead things. Once the plant has lured these decaying-flesh lovers, it smothers them with seeds so that the titan arum genes are spread far and wide.

It doesn't need us at all, and the stench of the corpse flower will leave us gagging and gasping for breath.

If you want to see this flower in the wild, you'll have to travel to Sumatra.

However it's now found in many places since it was first cultivated in the Kew Royal Botannical Gardens in 1889.

It's still a rare event though, there's never been more than six cultivated Corpse flowers in bloom, anywhere in the world, in a single year.

Want to grow one yourself? Don't be discouraged. The advanced gardener can often manage to produce a Corpse flower with a great deal of work (and money).

Put this little terror on your windowsill. On your porch. On your fence. Anywhere you want! Entertain your neighbours and mesmerise passers-by

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