People in Geelong city have beelined to witness an unusual event – the blooming of the Amorphophallus Titanum (called Titan Arum in short). Titan Arum is not your regular flower. It blooms once in a decade and is one of the largest in the world — growing over 10 ft in height.
It looks peculiar, with a tall, crooked, pale yellowish phallic structure — the ‘spadix’ — rising from the centre of what looks like an upturned meat skirt — its dark red, thick, waxy ‘spathe’, which is the spiral, petal-like structure that holds within it the inflorescence.
But its enigma lies way beyond its quirky appearance and infrequent schedule. The flower smells like putrid dead bodies. The visitors to the Geelong Botanic Garden got in line to get a whiff of the flower that would only release this smell for 24-48 hours. News publications reported them retching, gagging and saying it reminded them of sweaty socks or a dead possum.
The flower does what it does for survival. It mimics the stench of rotting flesh to attract its pollinators — carnivorous bees and flies that feed on corpses. The dark, red interior of the spathe that is exposed when it is fully open looks like the surface of a piece of uncooked meat, and the spadix in the centre even warms up to provide the perfect simulation of a warm, abandoned body.
And it works. The pollinators enter the giant interiors of the flower in search of food and, while flying away in disappointment, carry away pollen.
At the base of the phallic structure is the 'corm' — an underground structure that stores energy over the decade that it takes for it to bloom and the six more months it needs to fruit. This corm can weigh around 45 kilogrammes, the heaviest in the plant kingdom — nothing about this flower is regular!
Just one green shoot (that grows to be as tall as a tree) appears every year till the flower blooms to gather energy for it to survive. And, it has been observed that the fruiting takes up so much energy that it often kills the plant.
That brings us to the fruiting process — upon successful pollination, each Titan Arum produces around 400 reddish-orange fruits containing two seeds each, according to the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Titan Arum doesn’t bloom in the wild in Australia. It blossoms on limestone hills in the rainforests of western Sumatra, Indonesia, where it is called bunga bangkai (bunga means flower and bangkai means corpse). It was first described by Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari in 1878.
Since then, it has intrigued scientists and artists alike, for its tenacity to survive, making it seem like life on Earth may not have been a happy accident but a well-programmed, self-sustaining system.
Rafflesia arnoldi, the largest individual flower in the world, Dracunculus vulgaris, Stapelia gigantea, Hydnora africana and Helicodiceros muscivorus, as well as varieties of the Titan Arum, also emit a strong smell of decaying flesh to attract a similar class of pollinators — a tactic called ‘sapromyophily’.
Despite its complex attempt at survival, the species has fewer than 1,000 individuals left in the wild, according to the United States Botanic Garden, and is listed as ‘endangered’ in the International Union for Conservations of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Plants.