SAN FRANCISCO– Crowds lined up in San Francisco on Wednesday to see – and smell – the bloom of an endangered tropical flower that emits a pungent odor when it opens every few years.
An Amorphophallus titanum, also called corpse flower, began blooming Tuesday afternoon at the California Academy of Sciences, a research institution and museum.
The plant blooms once every seven to ten years for one to three days. During flowering, it releases a powerful odor that some describe as rotting food or sweaty socks.
“It’s kind of imitating the smell of some kind of dead carcass so that all the flies can come up to it and interact with it, pick up pollen and then take that pollen to another flower that can examine it because of the smell,” said Lauren Greig, a horticulturist, California Academy of Sciences.
It was the first bloom of the corpse flower called Mirage, which was donated to the California Academy of Sciences in 2017. Since 2020, it has been housed in the museum’s rainforest exhibit.
Bri Lister, a data scientist from San Francisco, rescheduled some meetings and waited in line for about an hour to catch the scent of the plant.
“In certain directions I definitely picked up the sweaty socks and sweaty gym clothes, but probably thankfully not full of rotting flesh, but definitely a more fragrant plant than average,” Lister said.
Monica Becker took her child from school to see the flower in person after seeing it on the academy’s livestream.
“When we heard it was blooming, we thought, we have it, we have to go, first thing in the morning when they open. So here we are,” Becker said.
The Amorphophallus titanum is originally from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with only fewer than 1,000 individual plants left in the wild.
