When a line of people are waiting around in Brooklyn, most people would assume they’re waiting for a concert. Instead, crowds flocked to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden eager to witness, but more importantly smell, the garden’s briefly blooming “corpse flower.”
Amorphophallus gigas is a close relative to the well-known—and more popular—”corpse flower,” Amorphophallus titanum. Both plants are native to Sumatra, Indonesia, and release similar carrion scents. The smell attracts pollinators looking for carcasses to lay eggs, and it is so convincing that first-day visitors equate the scent to a “dead rat.”
The structure of the plants’ bloom is unusual as well. Unlike a traditional flower, gigas and titanum bloom as an inflorescence, a cluster of smaller flowers arranged as a Florette. It takes several years before the plants have enough energy to emerge above the soil. Once they bloom, they can only sustain themselves for a few days before wilting and beginning to store energy all over again.
The smell also begins to change over time, with the consensus shifting from “dead animal” to “stinky cheese” as the three days went on.
Despite being less known, visitors last week got to observe a species perform a much rarer bloom. As BBG gardener Chris Sprindis explains, “It is not as large as an Amorphophallus titanum bloom, but its uniquely tall inflorescence is a significantly more rare occurrence.”
The plant reached over six feet tall, with many visiting parents hoisting their children on their shoulders to let them get a closer smell.
Lovingly named “Smelliot” by the BBG staff, the plant has been with the garden since 2018 as a seedling, with this event marking its first bloom. Staff had been keeping tabs on its progress since Sprindis noticed the inflorescence around the end of December, and some eager patrons had spent weeks waiting for the news to break, which it finally did at 10:30 a.m. on Jan. 24.
Once word got out, plans were canceled, work was put on hold, and botanical enthusiasts rushed over. Patrons Nadia S. and Alexa Cardamone had called the garden every day in the week leading up to the bloom and happily waited in the hours-long queue. “We brought our friends, who had no idea what it looked like before. They just came along for the ride and waited graciously in two-and-a-half hours of the cold, but yeah, totally worth it,” Nadia told The Brooklyn Paper.
Environmentalists are also thrilled to see the public braving the winter weather for the unique plant. This includes Yale University graduate Allegra Lovejoy, who told The New York Times, “In such an urban and digitized population, for people to be excited about a plant and make the effort to come out here is a really great thing.”
For many, it was a family endeavor. “I love watching parents holding up their kids to smell it and see their reactions,” Sprindis told The Brooklyn Paper.
Currently, only nine other gigas are growing in botanical gardens around the world. If you would like to keep track of when a future corpse flower will bloom, you can visit the United States Botanical Garden’s website to follow active plants.
