Corpse Flower

'Corpse flower' blooms, finally raises a stink

Clint Morse, a plant researcher, said he began to notice the smell while he was watering plants at UConn's greenhouses yesterday morning. By late morning, the flower began to show the first signs of blooming - an event UConn botanists have been anxiously awaiting for the past two weeks.

Researchers expected the plant to fully blossom by early evening yesterday. After it is completely open, it is expected to be in bloom for about two days. Before the bloom began, 10,000 visitors had come to see and smell the plant, UConn officials said.

Cape Cod Times

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Within the next few weeks, New Englanders will have the opportunity to see and smell one of the strangest productions of the vegetable kingdom: the titan arum, or corpse flower, which features a gigantic bloom � and a mighty stench -- is expected to open sometime near the end of June, at the University of Connecticut's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Conservatory.

The last time a corpse flower opened in the northeast was in the 1930s, at the New York Botanical Garden. Fewer than two-dozen have flowered in the United States since the titan arum bloomed for the first time in cultivation, at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England, in 1889.

University of Connecticut Story


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