Rare rotting-flesh smelling flower blooming at a Massachusetts college
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. What’s big, rare, and smells like literal death? If you guessed a corpse, you’re not wrong. The pungent flower in question is a tropical plant called titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), a species of corpse flower. Appropriately, people say it smells like rotting flesh. The stinky plants are rare and native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Nevertheless, a corpse flower named “Pangy” calls Massachusetts’ Mount Holyoke College home, where it has just bloomed, according to the Associated Press. “Terrible,” “horrible,” “putrid,” and “rotten” are just some of the one-worded descriptions the blooming has inspired, per a Mount Holyoke College social media video. One person has a more inspired take: “Impressive. I don’t think I’ve smelled a flower that smells like that anywhere, so very impressive.” The chances to be impressed by a titan arum are few, however, because its blooming cycle is brief and occurs every five to seven years. Researchers reportedly discovered the chemistry behind its pungent odor …
