Corpse Flower (Amorphophallus titanium)
Araceae (Arum Family)
You may have heard about the Gustavus corpse flower. This plant bloomed in Spring 2020 and attracted over 4000 people! The titan arum is native to Sumatra, Indonesia. Though mistakenly identified as the largest flower in the world, it is really more correct to call it the largest non-branched inflorescence (bouquet of flowers). When it bloomed it produced a foul smell (hence the name corpse flower). The smell attracts pollinators in the dense jungles of Sumatra. The bigger the inflorescence the more successful it will be in spreading the aroma and thereby attracting pollinators. A brilliant strategy for a stationary plant! Even better is the plant actually uses energy reserves to warm itself up to temperatures comparable to human body temperature. The warmth allows the compounds in the odor to volatilize more easily. So in other words, the warmer the titan arum gets, the stinkier it gets. The plant was given the nick name, Perry, from one of the Titans; ‘Hyperion’, the Titan associated with intellectual activity and observation.
The titan arum produces one leaf at a time for several years before it flowers. The leaf photosynthesizes and allows the plant to store energy in a large underground tuber. Each leaf lasts about a year before dying back and going dormant. Because flowering takes so much energy it takes several years (10+years) of just producing leaves and storing energy before the plant has enough reserves to produce a flower. Likewise it will take several years after flowering to store enough reserves to flower again.
Perry came to the College when Professor of Chemistry Brian O’Brien received 20 seeds in 1993 from a San Francisco physician named James Symon. After years of careful cultivation, the plant finally bloomed for the first time in 2007.