ISSUE #43: I Waited in the Cold for Three Hours to Smell the Stinky Flower
What else am I going to do on a Saturday?
Well, it’s nearly an entire month late, but Happy New Year from all of us (me) at Bugstack! I’m attempting to keep to something of a monthly or bimonthly schedule with these this year, which is a very vague way of saying that you’ll hear from me whenever I have something to post about. Hopefully that happens on a somewhat regular schedule. I nearly took all of this month “off,” but I couldn’t let January pass by without writing about SOMETHING. The last couple of entries have been decidedly bleak, so I decided to lighten the mood by discussing the smell of rotting flesh.
Conveniently, the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens’ resident corpse flower decided to bloom this weekend. I had been on the lookout for corpse flower news for a while, after seeing the news about two of them blooming in the U.S. Botanic Garden in D.C. in September, 2020. (To confirm this, I found this Wikipedia page listing every bloom on record of publicly cultivated corpse flowers worldwide.) There is also one in the Bronx at the New York Botanical Gardens, which I’ve been telling people bloomed “five or six years ago,” but its last bloom was actually in 2023. Time has always been somewhat amorphous to me. I missed that one, and I’ve been kicking myself ever since, so when I saw on the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens’ Instagram last week that not only did they have one, but it was about to bloom, I resolved to see it in person by any means necessary.
Those means turned out to be waiting in the longest line I’ve ever stood in for more than three hours, outside, in below-freezing temperatures, with a bunch of strangers who all had the same idea. This is the thing about doing anything in New York: if you’ve thought of it, so has everyone else.
Corpse flowers, or titan arums (Amorphophallus titanum, because it looks like a, you know), are large single-leafed plants native to Sumatra that get their name from a signature death-like stench that emanates from their somewhat rare flowering. They don’t bloom all the time—some can wait for ten years between flowers, and others as soon as two—and their flowers, which can grow up to 10 feet tall, only last for about two or three days. When they’re about to bloom, they grow a tall pale yellow “spadix” enveloped by a bell-like “spathe,” which looks like a petal but is actually a protective sheath that shields the tiny flowers growing inside. Over about 24-36 hours, the spathe unfurls, pale green on the outside and dark burgundy on the inside, and the spadix heats up and releases the stink to attract its pollinators, which happen to be insects like carrion beetles and flesh flies that eat and lay their eggs on dead things. The overall look is both menacing and sort of sexy, like Mugler’s Birth of Venus gown.
On Friday, the BBG Instagram account confirmed that their corpse flower was opening up. They acquired “Smelliot” in 2018 from a Malaysian nursery, and at that time it was only a couple of years old, so this is its first ever bloom. A New York Times article about the event was also published on Friday, prompting a mad dash of Brooklynites who had nothing else to do (and some enthusiasts who called off from work). I was sadly busy on Friday but decided I would go on Saturday, which also happened to be the second-coldest day of an extremely cold week. When I got there in the early afternoon, the ticket clerk told me it would be about a 90-minute wait, which sounded fine until I actually got to the greenhouses and saw the line of chilly hopefuls that doubled back on itself two or three times and snaked around the corner and out of sight.
I ended up standing in that line for about three hours total. There’s still a lot of snow on the ground in the gardens, unmarked by foot traffic, and some ice on the pathways. I tried passing the time by reading this article about Greenland’s glaciers and got about halfway through before my fingers got too cold to scroll. After that, I just eavesdropped on other people in line, many of whom didn’t actually know much about the flower other than its rarity and odor (fake fans). One girl in front of me was telling her companion about her upcoming trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, which reminded me of the Ernest Hemingway story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which an adventurer climbing the mountain freezes to death on the slope. Relatable….
After my allotted 90 minutes had passed I was still only about halfway to the entrance and couldn’t feel my toes. Fortunately I ran into a couple of friends who thought they had arrived too late to see anything, so they waited with me, shuffling forward at a top speed of 3 feet every 15 minutes. The park had officially closed by the time we got to the door, but we were just happy to be inside, following the line around the greenhouses until we got to the Aquatic House, home of BBG’s collection of orchids and carnivorous plants and other curios.
There it was, watched over by an intense-looking security guard and a velvet rope. To keep things moving, guests got about 20 seconds with the plant before being asked to leave, which I understand, but next time this thing blooms I think they should notify only me. The Times article describes Smelliot’s height as “nearly six feet tall,” but I am six feet tall and it’s taller than me. By Saturday, the spadix had already started to collapse and was bent in half, but it was still impressive and, for me at least, worth the wait. The smell had also faded since Friday so you had to really get your nose in there to smell anything, but that meant that you could get up close to a rare flower, so I’m not complaining. The smell itself contains the same chemical compounds of things like limburger cheese, sweaty socks, rotting fish, and feces, and to me smelled sort of sharp and definitely unpleasant, like feet mixed with old compost and wet banana peel.
It is funny that thousands of people lined up in the cold this weekend to look at something that smells dead for less than a minute, but that’s New York, I guess! It’s cool to see this amount of hype over a plant whose vibes are decidedly forbidding and gross, but that also feels like an appropriate dead-of-winter activity, reminding us all not only of the inevitability of death but that there are so many little creatures out there waiting to feast on us that a plant has started mimicking the smell just because. Come inside where it’s warm, and also kind of evil.
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Another corpse flower, “Putricia,” bloomed last week at Australia’s Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, and they set up a whole Victorian funeral display for it, complete with red velvet curtains and a smoke machine.
Loved your story. Thanks for sharing it.
Very funny! Seb would have loved it since he is very fond of smelly things.