Today we left work early to go see a flower.
This is a corpse flower (Random woman, crouching child, and ladder included in photo for scale) . It blooms only once every few years, and the bloom itself only lasts for 18 to 36 hours.
The interior is really quite lovely, if you don’t mind the distinct smell of rotten fish.
They cut ahole near the base of the blossom. I can only assume this is so the rest of us can see what the bugs the flower’s so desperately trying to attract see shortly before they die.
This is what the corpse flower plant looks like when it isn’t flowering. If not for the spots on the trunk, you would never guess they were even members of the same plant family.
This particular flower actually bloomed yesterday, so it’s already started the process of slow wilt. I am not sorry we waited until today, however, since the reason it is called a corpse flower is because it puts off a smell reminiscent of rotting meat, and the botany students manning the greenhouse and answering questions noted that by about 10pm last night the stench was so strong that people could smell it several buildings away.
It seemed like the sort of thing that was worth leaving work early to go see.
Hey! I seen one of those! Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden had one flowering recently, and I took a photo of their first one, back in 2004. In fact, if you search on Flickr using “Amorphophallus” there’s about 700 photos, some of them quite beautiful.
BTW, I adore your top-of-screen observant feline.
And wish you all the best with moving and your new house.