By Monday, it had started to close, but not before drawing hundreds of visitors. Similar blooms occurred at Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens in January and Geelong Botanic Gardens in November, each attracting thousands of onlookers.
Native to western Sumatra, Indonesia, the corpse flower, or bunga bangkai, blooms only once every 7 to 10 years, releasing a foul odour to attract flies and carrion beetles for pollination.
Fewer than 1,000 corpse flowers exist worldwide, with only about 300 in the wild, according to AP.
Canberra’s acting nursery manager Carol Dale said the simultaneous blooms across Australia remain a mystery. “One of the theories is that a lot of these plants are of a similar age, so they have just stored up enough carbohydrates in the corm to finally produce a flower,” Dale explained to AP. However, since these plants are kept in different climates and conditions, their near-simultaneous blooming is unusual.
Dale admitted that after 15 years without flowering, she had doubted whether the corpse plant could thrive in Canberra’s cold winters, which sometimes bring snowfall. “It’s been in our collection for slightly longer than these plants would normally take to flower for the first time, so we just didn’t think we had the right conditions,” she told AP.
The 53-inch (135 cm) tall bloom began opening around lunchtime on Saturday, with the stench intensifying by the evening. “By Saturday evening, it was incredibly pungent. We could smell it from across the road. It was definitely gag-worthy,” Dale recalled. Visitors compared the odour to rotting flesh, garbage, sweaty socks, and sewage.
Unlike Sydney’s bloom, nicknamed Putricia, which drew 20,000 visitors and nearly 1 million livestream views, according to Fortune, Canberra’s flower had limited ticketed access due to space constraints.
By Monday, the worst of the stench had faded. However, Dale noted that while collecting pollen, “when you’re right up close to the plant, it’s still got that rotting flesh smell”, AP reported.
