Corpse flowers on display at the U.S. Botanic Garden in 2017.
Adrian Higgins/The Washington Post A huge plant known as the corpse flower in recognition of its foul smell bloomed at the U.S. Botanic Garden on Sunday night, and another similar specimen may bloom imminently, the garden said.
Years pass between the relatively brief blooms of these exotic plants, according to the Botanic Garden. Their attraction appears to be the product of the beauty and brevity of their bloom as well as the disagreeable nature of the odor. They are among the lesser known of Washington’s natural attractions, and the two can be seen in the garden’s glass-roofed conservatory near Independence Avenue at the foot of Capitol Hill.
At a height of 82.5 inches, the first of the two plants “began opening and smelling late” Sunday night, the botanical garden said on social media. It last bloomed in 2016.
The second and slightly taller of the two specimens of Amorphophallus titanum “is also about ready to bloom,” the garden said. It was about six years old and had never bloomed before. With luck, the garden said, the second plant might open Monday evening, in what seemed a fortuitous coincidence.
However, it could not be immediately learned if the bloom had begun. The period of blooming for the species seemed almost as brief as the interval between blooms is long. A bloom usually remains from one to three days, the garden said.
The smell, a pungent foulness that paradoxically appears to be part of the plant’s allure, lasts for an even briefer period than the bloom. “The ‘stink’ is mostly just during the first 12 hours after it opens,” the garden said. The idea is to attract flies and beetles for pollination.
According to the garden, a small amount of odor remained into Monday morning and was expected to continue to fade as the day went on. However, the beauty of the bloom, which the garden called a “massive inflorescence,” was expected to remain visible throughout Monday. Presumably the same would remain true of the second bloom, which was expected imminently.
The garden’s main building is normally open during the summer from 11 a.m. to 6 p.
m. The garden keeps a “sizable number” of the plants in its facilities as part of its conservation efforts. Only about 1,000 exist in the wild, it said.
The possibility of two blooms occurring so close together apparently generated even more anticipation than usual. Information about the garden’s corpse flowers is available at USBG.gov/CorpseFlower.
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