She's Baaaack!

After days of drama--will she? won't she?--the Arboretum's five foot tall corpse flower (Titan arum) has bloomed! Two days after caretakers declared it to be a dud, the unusual plant produced a three foot wide flower, the color and smell of rotting meat. The smell is especially strong in the evening, right at bloom, in order to attract pollinators. Thanks to social media, a good part of our town was alerted to this happening, and people began drifting up to the site in order to catch a glimpse of a phenomenon that lasts only 24 hours.

We were at the gates when the facility opened at 8 this morning. Neighbor and fellow blipper Genuine Blip drove us up early to beat the crowds. There, as promised, was this stately strange and beautiful blossom, but it was far enough along in the cycle that the smell was negligible, more like a sense of very dirty socks than anything else. I was relieved, actually, since one onlooker said that even after she got home, she felt like she needed to take a shower to get the stink off. I was more interested in that gorgeous eggplant color, and those elegant pleats! 

This image has hints of a few stories. First, the other photographer: although we weren't trapped in a crowd, there was a healthy number of people milling about at 8 in the morning; I can't begin to imagine how many photos there are from this vantage point, but M's arm is there to remind us that we are not alone! The heater and the mist represent the difficulty of keeping this native of Indonesia alive in our climate; the curator gave it a drink of five gallons of water last night, and intensified the humidity and heat, so his careful tending paid off. The window at the base of the plant was cut in order to facilitate hand-pollination of all those tiny bits. So this is a story of perseverance, of love, of dedication, and of wonder.