SOUTH HADLEY — It was not the sweet smell of flowers that greeted Thomas Clark on Tuesday morning, but the pungent smell of sulfur, sweat and rotting flesh.
The director and curator of the Mount Holyoke College Botanical Gardens found the college’s corpse flower had bloomed, and its pungent smell had sweltered in the closed-up greenhouse overnight to “unbearable” levels.
“I couldn’t bear to be in here,” Clark said, referencing the Victorian-style Talcott Greenhouse.
This is the second time Mount Holyoke’s corpse plant, named “Pangy” after the college’s spring celebration, has bloomed. Visitors lined up in the Talcott Greenhouse to catch a whiff — and a photo — of the 67-inch-tall plant to see if the infamous smell is really as bad as its reputation. The short answer is yes.
“I was expecting it to smell bad, but it smelled genuinely like rotting flesh,” said Nyx DelPrado, a first-year student at Mount Holyoke College. “Its name is accurate.”
The corpse flower, or Amorphophallus titanum, is a tropical plant from the rainforests of the Indonesian islands. Most of its life, it looks like a single, stocky leaf, which photosynthesizes food to feed the tube-like structure in the soil. But every two to five years, it blossoms into a towering inflorescence that reeks. Its foul smell dupes beetles and flies into acting as pollinators.
“Some people say it’s the largest flower in the world. It’s an impressive structure, but it’s not an individual flower,” Clark said.
The corpse flower’s actual flowers are at the base of the tall beige column called a spadix. Surrounding the spadix, which produces the stench, is a velvety purple spathe. Peering into the spathe, matchstick-looking female flowers sit below a ring of male flowers.
“I didn’t know what the name meant. I thought it would smell like a corpse, but I don’t know what a corpse smells like,” said Mount Holyoke student Maheen Siddiqi. “And I smelled it and it smelled like really bad eggs or sulfur or something.”
A study out of Dartmouth discovered that a sulfur-containing amino acid called methionine and a foul-smelling compound called putrescine found in the corpse flower’s tissues might be the secret behind the scent. Putrescine in particular is released by rotting animal corpses. When the spadix heats these amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, the molecules vaporize into the air.
There are 250 species of Amorphophallus, many of which are found in tropical areas of Madagascar, Malaysia and Indonesia, but none produce a structure as large as the corpse flower. This species of titan arum is extinct in the wild, but many people still enjoy the natural wonder in conservation programs and living museums like the Mount Holyoke Botanical Garden.
However, Pangy will not bloom for long. The inflorescence begins to degrade after 48 hours, leaving scientists to wonder why a flower would expend so much energy on its blossom for such a short window.
This story is supplemented with quotes and information from Leah Willingham at the Associated Press
