The bloom of a giant and stinky Sumatran flower nicknamed the “corpse plant” because it smells like a dead body is drawing huge crowds to a southern California botanical garden.
The bloom of the Amorphophallus titanum plant began Sunday afternoon at the San Diego Botanic Gardens in Encinitas. By Monday morning, timed-entry tickets had sold out, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, and more than 5,000 people were expected to have visited the garden by Tuesday evening.
The bloom of the “corpse plant” lasts just 48 hours. During its peak, the flower emits a putrid odor of rotting flesh to attract carrion beetles and flesh flies that help its pollination process.
The blooming flower’s rotting corpse spell in the San Diego Botanic Gardens was so thick “you could cut it with a knife,” said John Clements, the horticulture manager there.
The corpse flower is extremely rare, with fewer than 1,000 remaining in the wild, according to the US Botanic Garden. It can grow up to 12ft tall and takes about a decade to bloom.
Earlier this year, more than 1,000 people flocked to an abandoned gas station in Alameda county in the San Francisco Bay Area to get a whiff of another corpse flower.
