You could call it slow TV. For the last 8 days, the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney have been live streaming an Indonesian lily famed as the largest and stinkiest flower-spike in the world.
They’ve been taking temperature checks – much like you’d do to check for ovulation – to see when it Amorphophallus titanum would bloom.
Today, it finally happened in the Palm House at the Botanic Gardens and right now Startup Daily is among nearly 9,000 people watching it online via YouTube.
You can go and see it yourself if you’re keen – the Botanic Gardens are staying open until midnight on Thursday, January 23, if you want to breath in what you’re seeing.
But the queues to see it are long enough to make you think there’s frozen yoghurt or Melbourne croissants inside. As celebrity photos go, it’s probably more famous than Timothée Chalamet right now, starring in its own movie.
The spike appears infrequently every several years and lasts just 24 hours.
It’s just the fifth time there’s been a bloom at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, with various plants in the collection previously flowering in 2010, 2008, 2004 and a double bloom in 2006.
More commonly known as the Corpse Flower – it smells like rotting flesh – just 1000 specimens of the endangered plant estimated to still be in the wild in the rainforests of Sumatra.
The Latin name is a reminder that it’s a man’s world – it translates as “giant misshapen phallus”. It’s also know as Arum Titan (Bunga Bangkai in Indonesian, which means corpse flower), and the tuber it grows from weighs around 50kg (some are 100kg+).
As nature goes, it takes a while to get to minimum viable product, with a single leaf, up to 6m tall, and looking like a small tree, growing from the bulb, over 12-18 months. The flower spike is typically around 2m tall.
The manager of volunteer programs at the Botanic Gardens, Paul Nicholson, describes the scent as something even Lynx Africa couldn’t mask: “If you’ve got some wet teenage socks, throw that into a blender, then you get some cat food you’ve left out in the sun, whack that in your blender, and then get some day old vomit. Put that in the blender, blend it all up, rip the lid off. That’s the kind of smell you’re getting. It’s actually stunningly beautiful as well.”
If you can’t get there, watch below and perhaps fart and breath in to get a smidgen of what it must be like.
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