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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. Slashdot fun by aridhol · · Score: 5, Funny

    Look - they have a graph of hits over time at the bottom. Let's see how well that thing scales ;)

    --
    I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
  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. 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
  4. Amorphophallus Titanum by lindsayt · · Score: 4, Funny
    This thing seems to have been named quite aptly.

    Going back to our Latin roots:

    • Amorpho = amorphous = Lacking definite form or shapeless
    • phallus = phallus = male penis or female clitoris, or a representation of the penis illustrating generative power
    • Titanum = titan = of prodigious size, strength or achievement

    So this flower is "scientifically" defined as an unusually huge and shapeless representation of the male penis. This is why men shouldn't name flowers...

    Of course to be fair, that gigantic flower is after all the plant's sex organ, so perhaps the description is apt...

    Definitions courtesy of Dictionary.com
    --
    I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
    1. Re:Amorphophallus Titanum by s-orbital · · Score: 4, Funny

      So basically a flower with a scientific name of "Huge Misshapen Dick" There is a flower to give to your S/O.

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      Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
  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. What kind of nutrients by Muhammar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I cannot imagine what kind of nutrients in soil can support such a fast-growing monstrosity. Do they have to feed it live sheep?

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    I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it