She’s five feet tall, her smell has been likened to hot cat food, and she’s attracting thousands of tourists to Australia’s Royal Botanic Garden Sydney this week for her big show.
The lovingly named Putricia is a Titan Arum, or a “corpse flower.” Putricia is one of fewer than 1,000 corpse flowers in existence, but if you’ve ever seen one in person, it was memorable: The plant emits a horrible stench when it blooms once every two to five years. The smell, while repulsive to humans, attracts certain pollinators who are clearly freaks.
Putricia’s sudden stardom. Sydney’s botanic gardens haven’t had a bloom, which only lasts about 24 hours, in 15 years, so visitors swarmed to the dramatic, velvet-roped display in a small greenhouse when the bloom started around 3:30pm local time Thursday. Around 20,000 visitors waited in line for as long as three hours to see Putricia, with nearly 1 million people watching the garden’s 24-hour livestream.
Always a stinky crowd-pleaser. In 2023, two corpse flowers bloomed in the US—one in San Francisco and the other in San Diego. Ari Novy, President and CEO of the San Diego Botanic Gardens, told NPR that the corpse flower bloom is essentially the plant world’s version of a zoo getting a panda.—MM
This report was originally published by Morning Brew.