3 minute read
CORPSE FLOWER
A Titan Of The Plant World
Earlier this year, a corpse flower bloomed in Sydney for the first time in fifteen years. Nicknamed ’Putricia’ by Botanic Gardens staff, she quickly captivated people all over the world, writes John Siemon, Director Horticulture and Living Collections.
Deep in the rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia, grows one of nature’s most astonishing and rare botanical wonders: Amorphophallus titanum, commonly known as the Bunga Bangkai (Indonesian), titan arum or corpse flower. This striking plant, famed for its enormous bloom and infamous stench, has captured the imagination of scientists, conservationists, and plant enthusiasts worldwide. Its fleeting flowerings, dramatic in both size and spectacle, are a testament to the intricacies of plant evolution and the challenges of global biodiversity conservation.
The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney successfully bloomed its own titan arums in 2004, 2006 (twice, just weeks apart), 2008 and 2010. Garden staff meticulously recreated the plant’s native conditions, nurturing it through its unpredictable life cycle –a cycle that includes years of vegetative growth, starting as a tiny tuber, before a flowering event, which lasts for only 48 hours. The 2004 flowering marked the first time a titan arum had bloomed in the Southern Hemisphere, drawing more than 18,000 visitors in just three days.
With much excitement, our Nursery staff announced in late December 2024 that they had observed a bloom forming in our glasshouse. Over the next 18 days that bloom would grow at a rapid 10cm per day, reaching over 1.6m in height. To ensure our visitors could witness the bloom, our staff carefully relocated the top-heavy behemoth to our heritage Palm House, established in 1876.
As Sophie Daniel, Manager of Interpretation & Placemaking, says, the team created “a royal display inspired by Queen Victoria’s funeral, crossed with a little shop of horrors, an homage to David Lynch, gothic funeral parlour vibes and vintage side show”.
On display, the titan arum, nicknamed ‘Putricia’ for her putrid smell, felt like she was lying in state with visitors approaching down a red carpet. Our incredible teams and volunteers supported a rapid influx of more than 27,000 people, many who queued for hours to see her. A livestream drew in more than 1.7 million views from all over the planet and unprecedented media attention reached millions more.
During the first night of her short bloom, Alyse Baume, Conservation Horticulturist in the Garden’s Nursery, delicately sliced a square into Putricia’s spathe and used a paintbrush covered in donated pollen to hand-fertilise her in the hopes of producing fertile seed in the coming months. On the second night the focus shifted to collecting her maturing pollen, which was raced to the PlantBank at the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan and into cold storage to ensure maximum viability.
These types of bloomings are more than momentous, they are critical in supporting international effort to conserve this species. They allow the blooms to be pollinated and new seed to be collected to distribute to other botanic gardens. The titan arum is just one of more than 12,000 species the Botanic Garden of Sydney’s Living Collection supports. In this case the titan arum has helped us to spotlight the plight of Sumatran rainforests and the challenges of protecting biodiversity in the face of climate change and human encroachment. It has also created much needed dialogue in plant conservation, generated significant donations and hopefully inspired a new generation of scientists.
