Thousands of plant lovers have booked tickets to see the blooming of “Alice”, the corpse flower in the Windy City. They have been expecting for another corpse flower at the garden called Spike to bloom over this past summer, but that turned to be a disappointment. “Given that titan arums are particularly indeterminate flowering plants (and we should know!), we wanted to be certain that she would freshness before we announced her debut”. “It should smell really bad tonight when the male flowers shed their pollen”. It was not actually Alice but a larger corpse flower named Spike that the botanical garden expected to bloom.
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Native to the rainforests of western Sumatra, the titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) or corpse flower (not to be confused with parasitic plants in the Rafflesia genus that have also earned this macabre common name) has a leaf structure that can reach heights of over six metres (20 feet) and would not look out of place on the set of Jurassic World.
Why does it smell so stinky? According to the Chicago Botanic Garden, the smell comes from “a combination of dimethyl trisulfide, isovaleric acid, dimethyl disulfide, benzyl alcohol, indole, and trimethylamine”. The Chicago Botanic Garden is located at 1000 Lake Cook Rd, in Glencoe, 1/2 mile east of the Edens Expressway. The smell of the corpse flower plant is so strong that it can lure insects as far as an acre away.
After the initial bloom it will take at least another two years for the flowers to bloom again.
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Visitors who came to visit were thrilled to see the flower and get a whiff of its smell. Horticulturists had to manually open Spike because it was not able to bloom by itself. “The flower is opening up as we speak, so it still has a little more time”. The corpse flower plant is colored pale green which bears a resemblance to a phallus.
