“The smell is like an overflowing food bin”: The peculiar attraction of the enormous, foul-smelling “corpse plant”
When it blooms, it attracts large crowds, smells like death, and takes ten years to flower. However, researchers are still working to understand the titan arum’s puzzling life cycle.
I find myself in a line of people moving along a narrow walkway within a heated, stuffy glasshouse. We make our way past groups of carnivorous plants and beneath drooping rhododendrons, but the main reason we’re here is to witness the titan arum blooming.
For generations, people have been fascinated by this enormous, foul-smelling, strange plant. But only since the 1990s have scientists started to delve more into its peculiar anatomy.
I have never before seen one. Around a bend, I see it in the next glasshouse: a long, pale yellow spike rising several meters from what appears to be a massive, thick, crinkly green petal with a pinkish-purple tip. As the notorious “corpse plant” scent, which has earned it numerous names, is about to hit me, I prepare myself.
The smell is perceived differently by different people; some find it to be like really stinky socks or decaying fish. It smells to me like an overflowing food bin. Daruk, Paulina Maciejewska
Here at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh (RBGE), this titan arum is the main attraction—at least for a few days. After two days of blooming, the 22-year-old plant, dubbed “New Reekie” in reference to an old moniker for the capital of Scotland (Auld Reekie), began to flower. It won’t last long, and I’m one of the about 2,000 guests attempting to get a look and a smell of this unique occasion.
Hortus Botanicus Leiden in the Netherlands sent a dormant, one-year-old corm (an underground tuber-like storage stem) the size of an orange to Edinburgh in 2003. The scales used to weigh newborn elephants at Edinburgh Zoo had to be borrowed by the crew when they last weighed the corm in 2010. It weighed the most ever recorded for a titan arum, 153.9 kg (339 lbs.).
For the past 13 years, Paulina Maciejewska-Daruk, an RBGE horticulture, has been caring for New Reekie. Growing, according to her, is actually rather simple. “All it needs is high temperature, lots of water, lots of fertiliser, and it’s just growing.” She continues, “But the excitement surrounding the plant is something entirely else.”
“After so many years, I’m usually, like, ‘Oh, it’s going to flower again; oh, I have to prepare too many things’,” she explains. “So instead of being a proud parent, I’m like, ‘Is my child ready for the big world?’ kind of feeling.”
According to Yuzammi, a botanist at the Research Centre for Biosystematics and Evolution in Indonesia and an authority on Amorphophallus, the larger genus to which the titan arum belongs, certain people in Sumatra, Indonesia, are fascinated and intrigued by the corpse plant.
The numerous names of the titan arum
The Titan Arum, scientifically known as Amorphophallus titanum (from the Ancient Greek, meaning “giant misshapen penis”), is the subject of several nicknames, many of which relate to its shape or fragrance.
It is referred to as bunga bangkai (“corpse flower”) in Indonesia. It can occasionally be the carrion or corpse plant. At times, it’s a big penis plant, also known as a titan’s penis.
Furthermore, botanic gardens enjoy naming their own plants. Examples include Grimace, Spike, Sprout, Velvet Queen, and, in a somewhat more humorous twist, Baby.
She continues, “But others regard it with worry, fear, and anxiety because they believe an old myth that it can be harmful.” “[There is an] erroneous belief that this plant can swallow humans due to the petiole pattern, which resembles that of a snake.”
However, the titan arum has also long been found living elsewhere besides its home island. It was initially brought to scientific attention in 1878 by Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari, who traveled through Sumatra and sent sketches and reports back to Europe while studiously disregarding any indigenous Sumatran knowledge of the plant. The plant’s tubers were also introduced at that time.
It quickly rose to popularity among Victorians, particularly after Kew Gardens in the UK hosted its first flowering crop in 1889. It gathered such sizable crowds during its second bloom in 1926 that the police had to be brought in to maintain order. Since then, titan arums have proliferated in botanic gardens all over the world, occasionally generating local news when they flower—an event that occurred just 21 times globally until 1989.
What exactly about this plant intrigues us so much, then?
For starters, a titan arum inflorescence—the plant’s flower head—in cultivation is still a quite uncommon occurrence. According to Yuzammi, it typically takes the plants 11–15 years to develop their first blooms because such a large flowering structure requires a significant amount of energy.
Yuzammi, the flower that has attracted a lot of attention from the public, is not a real flower.
The titan arum is a relatively unusual plant due to its immense size. Floral gigantism is most common in species pollinated by beetles or carrion-flies, according to research. This may be because it helps the species more accurately mimic the size and heat of huge animal carcasses and serves as a temporary trap for the pollinators. Titan arum must pass through multiple life phases in order to have any chance of accumulating sufficient energy to blossom.
Early life cycles of young plants alternate between leafing and dormant phases; neither of these stages has blooms. The “stem” stays underground during the leafing stage, which it uses to store energy. The structure above ground, which is occasionally misidentified as a tree, is actually a massive leaf that produces tiny leaflets. According to Yuzammi, the plant remains in a “state of rest” during the dormant phase, with only the corm remaining underground.
Looks also deceive, once it finally gets enough energy to blossom.
“The flower that has gained widespread public recognition is, in fact, not a true flower,” Yuzammi claims. “The colorful component is not… the petals, but rather a means of attracting pollinating insects and serving as a protective structure during the process of fertilization.”
The large structure resembling a flower is known as the spathe, although the actual flowers are tiny and many, situated at the base of the elongated yellow spadix, with the male flowers above and the female flowers below. This indicates that while the titan arum is the largest unbranched flowering structure in the world, it is by no means the largest flower in the world.
Following a few false beginnings, New Reekie flowered for the first time at the age of 13 in 2015, and it has flowered every two to three years since then (I visited during the fifth blossoming). The horticulturists who tend to it have also grown to know it better over time.
The additional corpse flower
Rafflesia arnoldii, often known as the stinking corpse lily or corpse flower, is a large flowering plant that grows in Sumatra that is closely related to the titan arum. It also emits a strong rotten flesh odor.
Although it is entirely unrelated to the titan arum, it is occasionally confused with it.
It is parasitic, unlike the titan arum, and when it blooms, it creates the largest flower in the world—a single, meter-wide bloom.
“This time me and my colleague were able to predict specifically which day it’s going to open up,” Maciejewska-Daruk said. “Of course, we are never 100% sure, but this time our prediction was spot on.”
And there’s the well-known smell. The titan arum’s tall yellow spadix releases a potent, permeating odor when it is in bloom.
Unfortunately, I arrived at New Reekie too late to smell this stench. Nonetheless, colorful accounts of the fragrance abound.
“It’s terrible,” Maciejewska-Daruk remarks. People’s impressions of the stink vary; some may think it smells like decaying fish or extremely sour socks. It smells to me like an overflowing food bin.”
Some people say it smells like feces, rancid cheese, or urine. The scent isn’t quite like most animal corpses, according to Jane Hill, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of British Columbia in Canada. “To me, it smells pungent, but more like a dead, desiccated mouse,” she continues.
In a 2023 investigation, Hill and her colleagues used highly sensitive equipment typically used to look for disease biomarkers in human breath to analyze the volatile chemicals behind this smell from its female and male flowers. She also saw that the plant was releasing these chemicals in brief bursts of a few seconds throughout the sample.
“Our study discovered 32 new molecules and showed that the male and female flowers emit different types of compounds, and sometimes the same compounds,” Hill explains. According to her, various insects may be drawn to distinct scents that are generated throughout time. “How did a plant figure out how to smell like a nasty dead thing in order to reproduce?”
Pollinators are tricked by all these scents into believing they are rotting meat, which helps transfer pollen from one plant species to another (all titan arums have blooms of both sexes, with the male flowers positioned above the petal-less female ones on the yellow spadix).
A crumpled mound of rotting yellow-brown plant detritus is all that’s left three weeks after it flopped to one side a few days after my first visit.
According to Yuzammi, it is also much stronger at night when its blooms are more developed because this is when its pollinators are most active. Other carrion-loving insects, such cockroaches, flies, and beetles, have reportedly been drawn to the stink, and stingless bees have been observed visiting the plant in the wild. It has also been seen that certain insects use the plant as a site to mate. However, the precise species that pollinate the titan arum are still mostly unknown.
However, the corpse plant has another unusual tactic up its sleeve to assist draw in these insects: it emits heat.
A botanist and taxonomist at the RBGE who has worked in Sumatra for over thirty years, Peter Wilkie tells me, “It’s helping pulsat[e] the smell out, the heat’s helping it attract pollinators,” when I visit him in his office next to the expansive herbarium of the gardens. “And it has to be quite hot as well, when you remember this is in the tropics [where] ambient temperature is quite high, and it’s very humid.”
This heat can reach up to 36C (97F), which is similar to the temperature of the human body, according to research. It is released by the titan arum in pulses that correspond with the discharge of its unique scent. Scientists claim that the reddish-purple tinted
It’s important to remember, though, that titan arum is not a carnivorous plant; rather, it draws insects for pollination rather for consumption. “Every time it flowers, I’m surprised how many people are certain that this is eating, killing the insects,” Maciejewska-Daruk says.
Due to its unusual biology and enormous size, the titan arum has gained a reputation that few other plants can match. However, despite the excitement surrounding inflorescence in numerous botanic gardens worldwide, the titan arum is facing difficulties in its natural habitat.
After 20,000 or more Scots waited outside the glasshouses in 2015 to witness a single blossoming titan arum, Wilkie was shocked to learn that the plant had never been officially recognized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
He conducted an examination in collaboration with RBGE horticulture Sadie Barber and Yuzammi. This was published in 2018, endangering its status. Less than 1,000 adult plants remain in the wild in Sumatra, where the population has decreased by an estimated 50% over the previous 90–150 years.
According to Yuzammi, the reduction is caused by illicit logging, the conversion of forests into agricultural land, natural calamities, and the local idea that the forest swallows people. She goes on to say that unlawful gathering for alternative treatment poses a risk.
According to Wilkie, the fact that it is still comparatively common throughout Sumatra is currently its saving grace. In addition, it prefers to grow in open spaces like logging trails rather than just in the main, unaltered forest. According to Yuzammi, the plant is currently protected under Indonesian legislation.
Wilkie notes that although Indonesian researchers are currently examining genetic diversity in the wild, the evaluation has raised the stakes for plants grown in botanic gardens as well, since these serve as a significant genetic reserve.