A rare flower with a smell that has been compared to rotting flesh and described as “worse than one thousand pukes” is bringing hundreds of spectators to San Francisco’s Golden Gate park.
The city’s Conservatory of Flowers announced on Tuesday that the plant, known as a corpse flower, was on the verge of blooming, a special event that is expected to last only a few days.
The flower is known for its pungent smell, large height (it can reach 12ft) and the fleeting nature of of its bloom. It can take between a few years or more than a decade for corpse flowers to drum up enough energy to unfurl a burgundy petal-like leaf to reveal a phallic center called a spathe.
The flower in San Francisco, named Scarlet, is one of five corpse flowers at San Francisco’s conservatory and the last time she bloomed was in 2019, according to the news outlet KQED. On Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of patrons lined up to get a glimpse and whiff of Scarlet, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. One visitor told the paper that Scarlet smelled “like a very pungent office fridge that hadn’t been cleaned out in a few months in a very warm room”.
For those who didn’t have the good fortune of witnessing Scarlet’s bloom in person, San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers set up a live stream so people can behold Scarlet’s glory remotely, before she closes shop for an indeterminable amount of time.
Corpse flowers are native to the rainforests of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, and are currently listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The organization points to logging as one of the reasons for the decline.
Scarlet was one of several corpse flowers to bloom in recent weeks. On 21 July, Wolfgang, the youngest corpse flower at the JC Raulston Arboretum at North Carolina State University, bloomed. At Washington State University, Vancouver, a flower named Titan VanCoug briefly bloomed during the final days of June. And on Sunday in San Diego, another corpse flower bloomed, drawing scores of plant lovers to the city’s botanic garden.
