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World's Largest Flower

Posted by michael on from the garnish-with-baby's-breath dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum) produces the world's largest flower and is currently in bud at the University Botanic Gardens Bonn (Germany). As of Thursday, 12 a.m. it is set to break the old world record established in 1932. The old record was 267 cm while the new bud is now 273 cm and still growing."

7 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Lawn by Samus · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't think this is the type of flower your neighbors would like you having in the front yard. When its sprouting it has somewhat of a phallic nature to it and then it smells like rotting fish. I've heard of other flowers that have horrible odors and people sending the plants to "friends" as practical jokes. Can anyone name a few of these nasties?

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  2. They have a live webcam by DeadSea · · Score: 3, Informative


    Live Webcam of the flower. As I post there are a bunch of people standing around looking at the flower and the flower dwarfs all of them. Quite impressive.

  3. Re:What's the flower... by heliocentric · · Score: 2, Informative

    Thanks for the support, it's always good to know kind people are on the 'net to help. I found the thing I was looking for referred to more directly as The Corpse Flower and that was the name I most identify with it. Never heard of something with the specific "decaying fish" armoa, just the non-descript "flesh." Also of note a Corpse Flower is in bloom in California I beleive, and that made local news.

    Thanks for your help.

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  4. way cool by RevAaron · · Score: 3, Informative

    I was in Germany on an exchange trip 6 or so years ago, and my host family had taken me to a botanic garden where they had a speciment of this species. I was totally bummed- I had finished flowering before I saw it, and was all wilted and dead-looking.

    Even dead it was surreal, the sheer size of it. The size of the pot, the size of the dead leaves... it was rad.

    Ok, I admit it, I'm a plant nerd. I've always been interested in plants, be it plant population ecology or ethnobotany or the care and feeding of entheogenic plants. Now a days I'm an aspiring computational ecologist. So yeah, I'm a sucker for this stuff.

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  5. Re:273 cm? by spotted_dolphin · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ummm... The conversion is 2.54 cm = 1 inch. We're talking about at a flower which is 107.48 inches or almost 9 feet.

  6. The smell by netkgb · · Score: 2, Informative

    It smells like decayed fish because, in the wild, the smell attracts every bug in a 5 mile radius to come and pollinate it.

  7. Re:The Big Stinky by scrawny · · Score: 2, Informative

    more info about the smell and its purpose. Google on 'corpse flower' for even more.

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