Titan arums do not flower regularly and it can take ten years for the plant to reach the size required to support a bloom.
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The flower’s pollen can be frozen for up to two years and a few of Alice’s will be donated to other gardens that have rare corpse plant.
Botanic Garden workers pollinated Alice on Tuesday morning with the help of pollen from a titan arum that bloomed in August in Denver and also from Spike.
“Head to a Garden now to see (and smell!) a intensely singular materialisation of a remains flower in full bloom”, announced a Chicago Botanic Garden on a website. “The plant has to spend energy to create the smell, so it only does it when the plant is ready for pollinators”.
Visitors who came to visit were thrilled to see the flower and get a whiff of its smell.
The plant is trying to lure carrion beetles and flesh flies (up to an acre away) that are attracted to the smell of decomposition.
Massive crowds flocked to the Chicago Botanical Garden on Tuesday evening to see a corpse flower in bloom. “This is the next best thing to flying halfway around the world to see it in its natural habitat”. Horticulturists had to manually open Spike because it was not able to bloom by itself. The Botanic Garden had seven experts on hand to explain the bloom to visitors who filed through a greenhouse.
“We were certainly all disappointed with Spike not opening a month ago”.
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According to Pollak’s documentation, Alice owned up to her corpse flower name right after blooming, early in the morning, but the awful stink then faded later during the day. That odor, described by the garden as a “combination of limburger cheese, garlic, rotting fish and smelly feet”, will only last for the next 24-36 hours. One of a Chicago Botanic Garden’s 8 remains flowers, dubbed Alice, began lush late on Monday, most to a warn of horticulturalists.
