Corpse flower again raising a stink
The smelly attraction at the Huntington is the tallest since 2009, center’s plant specialist says
A stench, often likened to rotting meat, is brewing at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino in the form of a rare corpse flower.
Stankosaurus Rex, the latest in an array of corpse flowers at the Huntington, bloomed Monday, unleashing its uniquely powerful — and among botany fans, wildly popular — redolence.
For the past week, the Huntington has hosted a livestream of Stanky, where viewers waited in anticipation for the bloom from the comfort of their desktops. Meanwhile, a steady flow of people have been visiting the famed library and gardens to behold the botanical wonder in person.
Such flowers’ stinky qualities evolved over time to attract pollinators, such as sweat bees, flesh flies and carrion beetles, who usually lay eggs on rotting animals in the wild, said Brandon Tam, orchid
collection specialist at the Huntington. Because these pollinators come out at night, corpse flowers strategically release their stench most strongly at the dead of night.
The odor’s intensity is experienced differently depending on the sniffer. Tam has seen kids enter the conservatory where the corpse flowers live and quickly run out from the smell. On the other hand, some adults have found the smell barely perceptible.
During the last few weeks, the corpse flower charged skyward. According to Tam, Stanky grew between 5 to 6 inches each day in the past week or so.
By Sunday, Stankosaurus Rex had reached 99 inches tall, breaking local records when it hit 82 inches on June 30. The next closest at the Huntington reached 81 inches in 2009.
Amorphophallus titanum is native to the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, where the plant began to be cultivated 20years ago.
This particular plant is 18 years old and was started from a seed at the Huntington. It’s the 12th of its kind to bloom there since 1999. Tam said the plants — there are 42 that call San Marino their home — usually bloom once every four to six years. After going dormant for 12 to 18 months, the plants gain enough energy to begin the cycle anew.
The plants can live as long as they’re cared for properly, Tam said. Even if the corpse flower’s corm — an underground organ in some plants — dies, often it will push out new growth in order to survive. These growths are genetically the same as the mother corm.
“So technically, it cannot die,” Tam said.
Despite smelling like its namesake, some like its odor. Or at least, they’re attracted to it. Some 10,000 people lined up to behold the bloom in San Marino in 2019, and hundreds of visitors came to view a blooming corpse flower at an abandoned gas station in the Bay Area in May, according to the Bay Area News Group.
The stench comes from a mix of compounds, Tam said, primarily methyl disulfide and dimethyl trisulfide. Another of those compounds is indole, a molecule used to add floral notes to perfumes and described by some as repulsive in higher doses, according to an article by National Geographic.
Other compounds in the mix include sweet-smelling benzyl alcohol and trimethylamine, which is found in rotting fish.
So what draws crowds to such an unpleasant smell?
Benign masochism is how psychologist Paul Rozin describe the attraction in a 2013 paper titled, “Glad to be sad, and other examples of benign masochism,” National Geographic reports. Rozin’s team found 29 examples that people enjoyed doing — such as the fear of a scary movie, the burn of chili pepper or the pain of a firm massage.
The draw to seemingly uncomfortable sensations offers a safe danger that attracts hordes of viewers to corpse flowers around the world, the theory goes.
Perhaps contrary to intuition, there are many “unpleasant” materials in perfumery, said Saskia Wilson-Brown is the founder and director of the Institute for Art and Olfaction, a Los Angelesbased nonprofit devoted to access and experimentation in the fields of perfume and smell.
“It’s sort of like salt in your chocolate chip cookie. You need a little bit of funk to offset the sweet. It kind of works better,” she said. The smell of civet is one famous example, WilsonBrown said. The perfume is extracted from the anal glands of the civet cat. Similarly, musk perfume comes from the musk glands, the anal region of a deer. These smells are used in perfumery because they add depth, she said. Corpse flowers contain cadaverine, a chemical compound contributing to its rank scent, WilsonBrown said, adding these seemingly bad smells — likewise with body and armpit odors — can be “attractive: They make us human, so we sort of secretly like it.”
Wilson-Brown hopes people can be open-minded about so-called bad smells, which can be interesting and convey useful information. When people wrinkle their noses and say, “‘Ew, I don’t like that,’ that’s a very reductive way of talking about things,” she said. “If they say, ‘Ew, that’s different for me, let me try that again, let me get to know it,’ (their) world will be much richer.”
According to Tam, the pandemic brought huge surge of interest in plants. “A lot of people became plant people,” he said.
Deforestation has left less than 1,000 corpse flowers living in the wild, Tam said. As a result, botanical gardens around the world are working to conserve it, fighting against extinction. Tam said it’s been rewarding to see a lot of folks investing time to watch the corpse flower. “I’m just extremely happy to see people coming to see the plant,” Tam said.
Go to huntington.org/corpse-flower to find out how to see and smell the fetid