http://cellar.org/pictures/corpseflower.jpg

With a Latin name of "Amorphophallus titanum" - which sounds like a joke - this flower is called the "corpse flower" for its smell. The stink from the bloom can be detected for over a half-mile.

It's from the rainforests of Sumatra, and fewer than 15 of these have ever bloomed in the US. This one is at the U of Wisconsin and they have thoughfully provided a webcam for the amusement of the rest of the world:

http://arum.doit.wisc.edu/

The plant has been there for seven years and will bloom any day. (I couldn't wait for that to happen to post the image. I'm too lazy.)

When a similar specimen flowered at Kew Gardens, in London, police had to be called in to control the crowd.

Thanks to serge for sending along the link.

(Dinara, will there be one of these at the community garden any time soon?)

...English. :)

~Mike

It's about blooming time!
 

FYI, the flower started blooming this afternoon. Follow the link above to see it!

This seems to be the best shot so far.


PS: You can't link to jpg, gif, etc that are not on cellar.org? http://www.cellar.org/images/icons/icon9.gif (Too much goat.. /. experience? http://www.cellar.org/images/icons/icon10.gif)

UPDATE:
Pure html seems to work but img tags seem to make all jpg and gif files to point to http://www.cellar.org

[Edited by serge on 06-09-2001 at 06:15 PM]

(shrug) It should be OK. Did it yak at you? I use the img code (surrounded by square brackets) instead of straight html when I link in the images.

Let me try... let's see here...

<img src="http://www.weirdal.com/021001k.jpg">
(Weird Al with Dr. Demento and Emo Philips)

(shrug) works OK for me, that was raw HTML.

People can link to goatsex if they want to. I guess the only harm is that it increases the chance that cellar.org gets into the obscenity filters in net nanny and such. As if saying "fuck" wouldn't get us there just as fast... I'm not gonna hold back one bit for the filtering people.

I wouldn't link goatsex myself. It's like I said in one earlier post... folks who want the stuff of talk.bizarre, or porn of various sorts, or horror shows, etc. have plenty of places to go already, and to me it gets boring pretty fast.

Now the flower is closing back up after what they think is a successful pollenation.

You know, thinking about this flower, it's really a remarkable thing... of course the reason it smells so bad is that it HAS to imitate the smell of a rotting corpse. From the "Facts" text from the site:

<i>The fully open inflorescence emits a repulsive, "rotting-fish-with-burnt-sugar" scent. The odor, strongest at night, is to attract pollinators, which in Titan's Sumatran home are mainly carrion beetles and flesh flies. Most fly- and beetle-pollinated "carrion" flowers are similarly colored and perfumed.</i>

If it didn't smell like death, it wouldn't get pollenated and wouldn't survive.

There was a guy on <i>Fresh Air</i> last week named Michael Pollan who has written a book called <i>The Botany of Desire</i>. The book studies several different plants - apples, potatoes, and marijuana amongst them - to see how they've coped and adapted to what humans want out of them. It was a remarkable half hour of radio. He pointed out that plants will do whatever gets their genes copied, and man's approach has radically altered the history of some plants.

In order for this thing to survive, it had to find some way to intrigue the carrion eaters of Sumatra to investigate it and pollenate it. We're used to the plants that have intrigued bees, not flesh-eating beetles, but the rules are the same.

Linking img tags - maybe only the sysadmin can do it? That doesn't make sense... did you use the format, "less-than img space src equals-sign double-quote http colon slashslash domain slash filename double-quote greater-than" ??