Already home to rare plant and flower collections, the Chicago Botanic Garden has its sights on growing one of the world’s largest — and most foul smelling — blossoms.
That would be the titan arum, also known as the corpse flower because of its pungent smell.
The flower can grow to heights exceeding a staggering 10 feet. Its nickname is fitting because, when in bloom, it emits an odor that smells like rotting meat so as to attract the scavenging flies and beetles that assist in pollination, said Kris Jarantoski, executive vice president and director of the botanic garden in Glencoe.
“It’ll give us a wow factor here at the garden,” Jarantoski said, adding he saw a corpse flower at the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley a few years ago. “It attracts a lot of people. When people see them they go, ‘Oh, wow!’ “
The plant is native to Sumatran rain forests in Indonesia, and its flower doesn’t bloom until the plant is at least 7 years old.
“People line up to see it when it flowers even though it smells,” Jarantoski said. “It’s beautiful. It is one of these oddities of the plant kingdom.”
The ability to grow a corpse flower is one of the aims of the botanic garden’s ambitious plans to vastly expand its greenhouse growing spaces.
Within a few years, the garden hopes to have more than 55,000 square feet of indoor growing space with 26 climate zones and state-of-the-art technology, versus 18,600 square feet and 11 zones today.
“Right now we don’t have the space to grow these great things,” Jarantoski said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re doing this whole project. We want people to look at plants a different way to say, ‘Oh my gosh, I never knew something could be that cool.’ “
