This time Australia is the lucky locale. Hundreds of peopleare lining up in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens to get aglimpse of the rarely-blooming Titan Arum, also known as the”corpse flower,” which has the world’s largest and worstsmelling blooms.
The smell is described as something like rotting flesh andits flowers can have a diameter of as much as four feet.They release the stench in order to attract insects.
The Titan Arum blooms only 2 or 3 times during its 40-yearlifetime and the flower lasts for only a few days. This onereached full bloom overnight. It’s only the second time ithas flowered in Australia. A Royal Botanic Gardensspokeswoman says, “We’ve never had one flower in Sydneybefore so there is unprecedented interest from tourists aswell as locals.”
It was first seen by Europeans in its native Indonesia in1878. A domesticated plant first flowered at the RoyalBotanic Gardens in the U.K. Other recent flowerings havebeen at the University of California and the United StatesBotanic Garden in Washington, D.C.
There are lots offascinatingmysteries in this amazing world.
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