Hundreds turn out to smell stinky flower

A rare flower that smells like “rotting flesh” has bloomed at the Geelong Botanic Garden, with thousands turning out to get a whiff of the stinky plant in full bloom.

The corpse flower, also named the titan arum, blooms about once a decade and lasts between 24 to 48 hours.

Geelong Botanic Garden coordinator Kellee Reissinger said when the natural phenomenon occurred, the flower released a foul scent that smelled like a rotting animal corpse, which was how the plant received its nickname.

“The plant was donated from the South Australia Botanic Gardens in 2021, they gave us two corns, which are the underground growth,” she said.

“For the past three years it’s just been putting up a leaf, it’s a deciduous plant so the leaf dies then comes up each year, then it goes underground and has a little sleep.”

About 4pm two weeks ago, Ms Reissinger said the plant produced another leaf then decided to flower.

“This is the incredible thing about the plant, when the flower starts to grow it looks like a leaf, so we’ve only known about this flower for two weeks and the countdown was on,” she said.

“Tuesday was when it started flowering, it got to a size of 1.5m, which is small for this plant but still incredibly big, and that’s when it started to emit a very strong smell of rotting carcass.”

The bloom has been live streamed to more than 55,000 people around the world, and has attracted thousands of visitors to the garden which has opened around the clock since Monday.

Ms Reissinger said the plant originates from the Indonesian island of Sumatra and there were less than 1000 corpse plants in the wild.

She said it took 10 years for the plant to build up enough energy to flower, which involved creating all its colours and appendages.