Corpse Flower Power!

There is an old saying that comes to mind at a time like this: "All botany is local." Never has the adage been proven more true than now, when a Titan arum (known to the scientific community as Amorphophallus titanum, and to laypeople as the "Corpse Flower") is blooming less than a mile from my house.



An event like this doesn't happen often (as in, never before in Minnesota), so we just had to bring our seven kids along to view the big ol' plant.



This is not the petal, because this is not the flower.



We decided that the smell of the plant was most similar to dead fish. It didn't agree with Josiah.



Jonny didn't care much for it either. I now understand why they put the plant in Nobel Hall - the stink doesn't make much of a difference there. In pure, clean, pristine places like Olin Hall or Old Main, it would have been a problem.



This is looking down the bloom. Here you can see the pestle, which means that the yellow part near the bottom is the mortar.



The smell was so bad that the children needed to run away from it as fast as they could.



And, to not appear to be ageist, I brought along some really, really old people to look at the flower. For some reason they were offended by the term "Corpse Flower".