Two of America’s rare penis flowers went soft as quickly as they popped up last week.
A pair of the world’s biggest, stinkiest botanicals bloomed at gardens in California last week — unleashing a potent stench of dead flesh that emanates from their phallic centers.
Also called the corpse flower — in reference to its rancid, odiferous qualities — the giant plant grows up to 12 feet high, though its nightmarish bud returns only sporadically, sometimes with decades between blooms.
Once they finally appear, their rank debut lasts only a few days — which had flower seekers flocking to the Huntington Museum in San Marino and San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers, reported SFist last week.
The conservatory — which named its penis flower Chanel the Titan — offered a real-time livestream of the evocative event on June 17. Now the camera shows only a flower whose spadix has flopped over its foreskin-like petal, called a spathe.
Soon after, the Huntington shared a time-lapse video of its flower unsheathing on June 19 before ultimately going limp earlier this week.
The New York Botanical Gardens’ own penis flower bloomed two years in a row in 2019 and 2018, as well as 2016. Meanwhile, the spectacular sighting has become one of the most sought-after attractions among garden-goers globally.
To more civilized scientists, the penis/corpse flower is referred to as titan arum, short for its scientific name, Amorphophallus titanum — which literally refers to the phallus, as greenhouse manager Rogier van Vugt said last year when the penis flower he was looking after in the Netherlands bloomed for the first time in 25 years.
“The name amorphophallus actually means ‘shapeless penis,’ ” van Vugt said at the time. “But with a little imagination, you can indeed see a penis in the plant. It has in fact a long stem and on top is a typical arum with veins. And then in the center, there is a thick white spadix.”
But the titan arum isn’t the only botanical tourist attraction with a raunchy title. Authorities in Cambodia recently issued a warning to fans of florals, asking them to stop poking and plucking their native and endangered erect bloom, the Nepenthes holdenii, or “penis plant.”
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