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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."

3 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
  3. 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.