2015 CORPSE FLOWER “STINKY”

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Thousands Stop to Smell a Flower (and Hope Not to Gag)

DENVER — It felt as if all of Denver was there, clutching their souvenir motion sickness bags and taking selfies as they waited for hours — and hours — for a glimpse and a whiff of this city’s celebrity of the moment: the corpse flower.

For years this city has anticipated the bloom of this plant, a green and purple giant that opens for less than 48 hours and emits a perfume that botanists liken to that of rotting flesh. While the evolutionary purpose of the scent is to attract pollinating bugs that normally feed on dead animals, the smell had the effect of attracting thousands of visitors this week to the Denver Botanic Gardens, where they stood in a snaking line for their moment with the stinky star.

“It’s the equivalent of the circus coming to town,” said Alan Walker, 65, a volunteer who stood at the entrance to the gardens on Wednesday amid a sea of stroller-pushing parents and children in sun hats. He confided that while he is a plant lover, he found it odd that “all these people would line up for something that smells like a combination of Limburger cheese and gym socks.”

Inside the gardens, the guest of honor sat perched inside a greenhouse window, its wrinkled yellow spadix — the pointy center part — thrust upward, and its ruffled maroon spathe flaring outward. Garden workers had rolled out a red carpet at its feet, and families took turns posing for pictures in the flower’s midst.

The corpse flower, known more formally as the titan arum, is native to the rain forests of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, but elsewhere lives only in botanic gardens, said Nick Snakenberg, curator of tropical collections at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Rare and fussy, the flower typically must be eight to 20 years old before it blooms for the first time; after that, it continues to bloom infrequently. Scientists know it by its Latin name, Amorphophallus titanum.

As visitors wrinkled their noses and gazed at the flower here, conversation turned to its perfume: Did it really live up to its rotting-flesh reputation?

“Personally I think it smells like old cabbage, maybe a couple of dead mice,” said Rich Clark, 44, a guard from Big Al’s Security who had been hired to watch the flower. He had expected to need the gas mask that Big Al’s had provided but found himself able to leave it on the floor.

Nearby, Riky Doolittle, 11, said she had waited in line for three hours to see her favorite flower, one she had previously seen only in pictures. While her experience was not gag-worthy, she said, she found it noxious enough. “It smells like the Italian sausage that my mom buys,” she said, before heading off to lunch.

Behind her, Donald Brynildson, 91, stepped off the red carpet and declared the experience “once-in-a-lifetime.” “It’s awesome, really,” Mr. Brynildson said. He declined to comment on the flower’s odor, adding that, unfortunately, “I really don’t smell that much anymore.”

The Denver gardens received this particular flower from a private donor — a “plant geek” who wished to remain anonymous, said Mr. Snakenberg — in 2007, when it was about five years old. While other corpse flowers have bloomed in the United States, this one is a first for the Rocky Mountain region.When the flower’s skirt began to unfurl on Tuesday night, it was the end of a dayslong vigil followed throughout the city via a live-video feed called the StinkyCam. On Wednesday, flower fans began lining up at 4:30 a.m., and the first visitors received complimentary relief bags, though a spokeswoman for the gardens said she had not heard of anyone having to use them.

By midmorning, the flower’s chamber was filled with people, including four women in high heels who skipped the hourslong wait in line and hopped onto the red carpet for a photo, explaining that they had previously been part of the gardens’ public relations team. “Oh my God, they did an awesome job” getting the word out about the flower, said BrieAnn Fast, 31, as she peered at the crowd behind her.

By the end of the day, 12,000 people had paid to visit, an attendance record for the gardens.

Not far from the red carpet, Mark Taylor, 30, a reporter for the local CBS television station, grabbed the gas mask, explaining that an on-camera segment with such scary-looking gear would be great for his résumé. “I had to fight for it,” he said of the assignment.

By JULIE TURKEWITZ AUGUST 21, 2015

Corpse flower mania is in full bloom in Denver

Thousands of people turned out this week for a glimpse, or better yet, a sniff of "Stinky the Corpse Flower," a towering tropical plant that reeks of rotting flesh and whose bloom has become a citywide obsession. Lines began forming outside the Denver Botanic Gardens at 4:30 a.m. Wednesday after viewers from around the world saw the enormous flower unfold on live-streaming video. The spectacle is yet another score for the titan arum, aka corpse flower, an odoriferous cash cow and reliable crowd-pleaser in the often tame and manicured world of botanic gardens. Standing among the workaday cycads and orchids, the 5-foot-high Indonesian plant is a freakish, if alluring, anomaly.

And by Wednesday evening more than 12,000 people, many paying $12.50 each, had waited for up to five hours to see and be photographed in front of it. This year, crowds showed up to witness a blooming corpse flower at UC Berkeley, and similar turnouts are expected next week at the Chicago Botanic Garden where a titan named Spike is set to bloom.

The Huntington Library in San Marino has 43 of the plants in its greenhouse. Five have flowered since 1999. "We had 12,000 people show up the day our first flower bloomed," said Lisa Blackburn, communications coordinator for the Huntington. It was the largest turnout in the institution's history. "The people in Denver asked our advice," she said. "I told them they needed a plan to deal with the crowds and then just go with the adventure.“ The plants, she said, are "great for attendance," but aside from T-shirts, the Huntington does little merchandising around them. "People are fascinated by them," Blackburn said. "It's really an amazing plant, and if it looks disgusting and smells gross, then that's just a bonus." In Denver, corpse flower mania has mounted for weeks. Stinky is said to be the first of its kind to bloom in the Rocky Mountain West, an event anticipated like the birth of an especially rank-smelling baby. The media have kept a constant vigil on the 15-year-old plant, and a streaming video camera monitored signs of imminent flowering.The first stirrings began about 8 p.m. Tuesday, shortly before the botanic gardens closed. By 4:30 a.m., people were outside itching to get in, and by noon, 2,000 had lined up to see the flower. A local television station reported that more than 7,000 people worldwide were watching its live stream of the blooming, briefly crashing its server.

Still, a tinge of disappointment ran through some early risers pouring in to witness Stinky in action. The king-size plant perched behind a glass wall lacked the putrid punch many expected. Complimentary barf bags remained largely untouched. Staffers swiftly opened a vent behind the plant, taped a "Smell Here" sign and ushered people back for the full stinking experience.

"I definitely see the similarities between what I smell here and what I smell down at the office," said Gary Broyles, who conducts autopsies for a living.

The botanic gardens' Twitter feed, using the hashtag #StinkyDBG, lighted up with photos and tweets, including one from the Denver Post's marijuana critic, Jake Browne.

"In honor of the corpse flower blooming at the Denver Botanic Gardens, here are five weed strains that exemplify how truly awful pot can smell," Browne tweeted. That prompted this reply: "Dear Denver Corpse Flower Mania, you have officially jumped the shark.“

"For a while we were the top trending item on Facebook," Bird said.

By 7 p.m., the line stretched nearly the length of the gardens. Parking lots were full, but people kept coming until the place closed at midnight. A red carpet lay before the flower, lending a regal air to the proceedings. Visitors stopped, photographed Stinky and were moved along by security.

"We waited five hours, but it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience," said Elizabeth Erickson, 38. "The area in Sumatra where it grows is being deforested so quickly who knows how long they may exist?“ The crowds continued through Thursday, though the stench lessened.

The flower is expected to collapse and die sometime Friday.

By DAVID KELLYAUGUST 21, 2015

By SARAH KAPLANAUGUST 19, 2015

Denver Corpse Flower Finally Bloom, Stinks up Botanic Garden

For days, Coloradans have held their breath — and their noses — as they watched the plant that has suddenly become Denver’s most famous flower.

The 15-year-old titan arum, better known as Stinky the corpse flower, has long sat serenely in a Denver Botanic Gardens greenhouse, looking like nothing more interesting than a large, stocky green stem.

But recently it’s undergone a rapid transformation, shooting up four feet in the course of just a few weeks. And late Tuesday night, Stinky unfurled its ruffled green-and-purple leaf and began to bloom. The effect was disgusting.

Like “a number of dead mice maybe rotting in an abandoned gym locker,” curator Nick Snakenberg told Denver TV station CBS4.

Over the course of the next 48 hours or so, Stinky will release the unbearable scent of a decaying corpse as it tries to attract the bugs that will pollinate it. Then the flower will die, and the plant will go dormant for another half dozen years until it’s ready to bloom again. But not before the Denver Botanic Gardens have squeezed every ounce of publicity out of its bizarre new blossom.

According to USA Today, the gardens have seen a record 30,000 visitors in the past 10 days — almost as many as it gets in some months. The plant got its own hashtag — #StinkyDBG — on which it bantered with other corpse flowers around the country. The garden gift shop began selling limited edition corpse flower t-shirts, and a local doughnut shop started churning out corpse flower doughnuts. A local TV station even has a live camera trained on the blooming plant.

The gardens will be open until midnight for the two days that the flower is in bloom.

“This is super unique to have just one plant that people are coming to see,” Denver Botanic Gardens spokesperson Erin Bird told USA Today. “I think it’s just human curiosity, the interest in the weird and the absurd, and also the anticipation of the unknown that is stringing us along. We don’t know when Stinky will bloom.”

Though DBG staff have known that a bloom was in the works for weeks, they didn’t know exactly when the corpse flower would unleash its characteristic putrid odor.

Stinky is one of at least three corpse flowers to bloom in the U.S. this year — one of the plants stunk up the botanic garden at University of California – Berkeley earlier this year, and another is set to bloom at the Chicago Botanic Garden within a couple of days. And a more than five-foot specimen graced the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington with its putrid scent in July 2013.

By JULIE LEIBACHAUGUST 19, 2015

Picture of the Week: Denver Botanic Gardens Corpse Flower

A rotten stench has been wafting through a greenhouse at the Denver Botanic Gardens—and visitors are all too eager to breathe it in. Who knows if they’ll ever get a second chance?

The odiferous offender is a plant native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra and known commonly as the “corpse flower,” for reasons that are pungently apparent when it starts blooming. At that point, it becomes a botanical stink bomb, emitting a noisome odor evolved to attract certain beetles and flies, which unwittingly spread the plant’s pollen. All told, the blooming process can take about 36 hours and won't happen again for years—if ever.

“It’s something that is potentially a once in a lifetime opportunity to see,” says Nick Snakenberg, curator of tropical plants at the Denver Botanic Gardens. “We made the mistake of saying it might bloom on [August] 16th, and we had people lined up at the gate.” The garden has several corpse flowers, but this is its debut bloom. The process started on Tuesday evening.

The corpse flower belongs to the same family as common houseplants such as philodendrons and peace lilies. But unlike its more domestic cousins, the place you’ll most likely find this tropical species—which can reach 15-20 feet in its vegetative state, according to Snakenberg—is in university and botanical garden collections. (At the floral stage, the plant is shorter.)

It takes a lot of energy, and a long time, to build up a bloom. When a corpse flower finally starts the process—the Denver specimen is an estimated 12 or 13 years old—a leaf-like sheath called a spathe unfurls, revealing a ruffly, burgundy interior that starkly contrasts with the plant’s green exterior. In its fanciful shape and two-toned hues, the structure is reminiscent of a weird hat you might see in a Tim Burton film.

But the plant’s true centerpiece is a fleshy, protruding structure called the spadix, which inspired its scientific name, Amorphophallus titanum. Translation? “The giant misshapen phallus,” says Snakenberg. The spadix also heats up, probably as a way to better waft the stench to would-be pollinators. Out of sight at the base of the spadix hides the actual flower—or flowers, to be more precise. In fact, the corpse flower is the largest unbranched inflorescence, or collection of individual flowers, on earth. The female flowers mature first, followed by the male ones, which produce the pollen that the insects collect.

The odor that emanates from the flowers is a putrid potpourri of chemicals, explains Todd Brethauer, a science education volunteer at the United States Botanic Garden, in a video produced by the American Chemical Society. Characteristic molecules include dimethyl trisfulfide, “which you can sort of describe as the smell of rotting onions or rotting cabbage,” says Brethauer, as well as trimethylamine, “which is the essence of rotting fish,” and isovaleric acid—“essentially the smell of old sweat socks.”

Given the plant’s fetid scent, why do visitors come in droves to sniff and see? “I think people have a similar reaction to this as they would to, say, a roller coaster ride or a haunted house or something like that,” says Snakenberg. “I think it's just wanting this sensory overload in a safe environment. A shock to the system.”

But maybe those visceral thrills will translate into something with staying power—at least, that’s what Snakenberg hopes, anyway. In the way that big cats and bears excite zoo goers about the animal kingdom, “I think having plants like the Amorphophallus titanum species in our collection is a real strong tool to excite people about plants,” he says, “and when we get excited about plants and about animals, we get excited about conserving them in the wild and protecting their environments. And when we protect the megaflora and the megafauna, just by default, we’re protecting everything else that lives in those environments”—the stinky, the sweet, and all that's in between.

SOCIAL MEDIA #StinkyDBGFACEBOOK #1 trending story on Facebook (worldwide)!

Bloom time lapse video had 164,000 views. Most popular Facebook post prior to #StinkyDBG was Chihuly at 37,000 views.

Gained 10,000 followers in one week!

INSTAGRAMCross-promotion with Chicago Botanic = Stinky and Spike long distance relationship.

Record engagement with comments and likes. Followers cheered #StinkyDBG on, shared they were following from around the globe and LOVED the conversations with Chicago’s plant.

Gained 2,000 followers in one week!

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Claire Martin @ByClaireMartin You know what would be awesome? A @Botanic drinking game for each nanosecond the corpse flower moves!

Orangutan Pals @Orangutanpals #corpseflower reminds us of the devastation that #sumatra is facing today. These are rare gems that reside in such beauty.

JJ Kincaid @RadioJJ I might see the "corpse flower" over at the @Botanic to see if it reminds me of my old commute in Jersey.

Rachel Sapin @Rachelsapin This is a long work week. I'm very relaxed by watching the corpse flower sit in darkness right now via live feed.

janet cadsawan @janetcadsawan I don't know what worse, waiting for a baby panda or #StinkyDBG.

D-Ron Dudley @drondudley I have been on Corpse Flower watch for 3 days now! Play some Rob Zombie for that thing and it will Bloom!

Avery Gilbert @scienceofscent My social schedule this week hinges on a giant stinky penis plant.

Janet Flora Corso @janflora I am in Virginia obsessing over the #corpseflower Thanks for the timesuck! :) Go Stinky!!

Adam Olsen @olseaj22 Based on my YouTube #StinkyDBG time lapse research, my expert prediction is early tomorrow afternoon #StinkyTime.

55,303 visitors between Aug. 10-24. 12,000 visitors on bloom day Aug. 19 = record paid day.

$71,075 revenue from paid admission on Aug. 19-20.

Red carpets: 1 Branded barf bags: 1,000 Barf bags used: 0 Longest wait: 5 hours

People dressed as bananas: 2

Corpse flower t-shirts sold: 400

Corpse flower tattoos to commemorate the event: 2

Doctors who cut line on the way to the operating room: 1

Photos taken in front of the corpse flower: approx. 50,000 Longest distance traveled: Florida

ATTENDANCE

233 new memberships between Aug. 19-2376% purchased at front counter

 586 renewed memberships between Aug. 19-23

54% renewed at front counter 1,078 volunteer hours between Aug. 19-23

In 2014, Ambassador volunteers served 201 hours in the Visitors Center

between Aug. 19-20. In 2015, they served 414 hours!  

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