Rare Illinois Corpse Flower Blooms in Impressive Time-Lapse Video
The big smelly day finally arrived at Rockford's Nicholas Conservatory and Gardens. 'Grimace', the corpse flower find stunk up the place.
The fascination with SEEING a corpse flower up close make sense to me. People fascinated by getting an up-close whiff of a flower that smells similar to a dirty diaper, is something I don't understand.
I've read up a bit on the corpse flower (Titan Arum) and I learned a few interesting tidbits about this rare flower.
Corpse Flower Fun Facts
- It grows in the wild only in the equatorial rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia
- The flowering plant has the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world, reaching over 10 feet tall
- The underground stem is the largest known, weighing around 110 pounds
- From 1939-1999, it was the official flower of The Bronx
From that, I get why it's pretty cool to look at IN PHOTOS, or this cool time-lapse video that Nicholas Conservatory and Gardens just shared on Instagram.
Like the woman in the video is displaying, being next to this flower's stank is a perfect time to put your mask back on.
The flower's smell consists of:
Dimethyl trisulfide (like limburger cheese)
Dimethyl disulfide (garlic)
Trimethylamine (rotting fish)
Isovaleric acid (sweaty socks)
Benzyl alcohol (sweet floral scent)
Phenol (like Chloraseptic)
Indole (like feces)
Most of us have smelled these things but could never imagine whiffing those stenches all at the same. But there are others that got to conservatory in a hurry to watch the corpse flower's very short bloom, which is when the flower emits all the 'goodness' mentioned above.