How do you get 3,000 people to visit the greenhouse in one day? Have a corpse flower bloom! And if you want even more, have two bloom in a month! During the month of May, we had an amazing crowd of plant lovers converge on the botanical gardens to see our two titan arums, Rotney the Magnifiscent and Odie, bloom. Both were about five feet four inches tall and smelled just awful. Personally, I felt very fortunate to have the opportunity to smell two different corpse flowers so close together in time.
Differences in smell were obvious: Rotney’s odor was slightly milder with a healthy dose of dead fish and decayed garbage mixed in with the rotting deer on the highway smell, while Odie smelled more like dead raccoon with a heavy dose of used baby diaper. To answer the obvious question, no, in all of my almost fifty years I never thought that I would ever write a sentence describing the differences in smell between two corpse flowers.
