Flowers blooming usually brings fresh floral scents that are a blessing to the nostrils. A school’s rare corpse flower doesn’t exactly emit the same aroma, opting to share its famously foul stench for only a brief period of time.
Eastern Connecticut State University’s corpse flower bloomed for the first time in years, blossoming at the Willimantic school’s greenhouse. The flower is known scientifically as Amorphophallus titanum and was nicknamed Rhea by ECSU.
Bryan Connolly, an assistant professor of biology at ECSU, said the flower was brought to the school in the 1990s. It took almost a decade before blooming for the very first time. Rhea now has become more confident, blossoming every few years but the spans in between blooms have been difficult for the department to predict.
Connolly and others have to act fast too since the bloom tends to only last for up to 48 hours. “It’s so ephemeral. It’s a real treat,” Connolly said. “When it happens, it’s basically a surprise and it only lasts 24 to 48 hours and then it’s gone.”
The school started doing daily live streams of the plant on YouTube when they realized the flower was about to bloom. Connolly explained that the unique scent emitted by a blooming corpse flower resembles “a combination of a dead mouse, a rotting cabbage and sewage.” A real treat for the senses.
Source: https://youtu.be/9SZrJ8NVO78