Putricia, the Corpse Flower – The Weird Side of the Internet

Written by on January 29, 2025

Putricia, the Corpse Flower – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

The world of flora is a fascinating world, even if you don’t know Latin. That’s because botany is everywhere. From a soothing walk in the woods to the “craft beer” like essence of the thriving marijuana market, we just couldn’t live without our plants. Like, literally. And there are oddballs like the Venus flytrap, one of the few carnivorous plants, and we have the Carolina Reaper pepper, which should come with a gallon of milk per serving, but nothing really compares to the amorphophallus titanium, or the Indonesian name Bunga Bangkai, or, in plain English, the corpse flower.

First off, they’re rare, only 300 in the wild, and about a thousand not in the wild. They’re rare because the only bloom every 7-10 years. They’re wonderful because when they bloom and unfurl their flower, they emit the pungent odor of decay. More than that. Gym socks, garbage, and yes, death.

There’s one in the Botanical Garden in Sydney, Australia, and it is a superstar. People crowd the garden by the thousand on the day it blooms, all so they can get a sniff. They call it Putricia, and in person and online, there is a fanatical Putricia cult. Acronyms like WWTF (We Watch The Flower) and WDNRP (We Do Not Rush Putricia) abound.

Putricia odor is to attract flies and insects, to get them to burrow in, get sticky, and go pollinate. Considering they’re so rare and the only bloom about once a decade, they have a really hard time with the bow-chicka-bow-wow.

So would you go all the way to Sydney to get a whiff of death? I don’t know if this is a draw for anyone who’s worked a kitchen or had a dead mouse in their wall. But hey, to each their own. Maybe it’s a life-death thing. Maybe it’s some people’s eclipse, or their visit to a Tibetan monastery in Kathmandu. People are weird; plants are weird too now, I guess.

Photo by Sailing moose – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70296828

 

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