More than 2,300 visitors queued up at the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley on Saturday to see Trudy, a "corpse flower" that was in bloom.
Corpse flowers or Amorphophallus titanum are native to Sumatra, Indonesia. They bloom once every few years and are known for their putrid smell, like a rotting corpse, which is uses to attract flies and other pollinators for the plant, according to the Biological Sciences Greenhouse.
"It's very difficult to describe the smell," Paul Licht, UC Botanical Garden director, said in a statement. "I've been saying for years that it smells like a large, dead mammal - a rat or a dog or a cow. Other people say it smells like dead fish."
Corpse flowers typically bloom to about 8 feet, meaning that Trudy (which is actually a male plant, according to the UC Botanical Garden), which only bloomed to 4.5 feet, is actually quite small. Building such a large bloom takes a large amount of energy, Licht said, which is why corpse plants only bloom once every few years. The blooms last a few days before they wither.
Licht noted that it's challenging to predict when a corpse flower will bloom, adding that he's never accurately predicted when one of the corpse flowers will bloom. Part of the reason for the inaccuracy is because corpse flowers have not been studied much in the wild, he said.
"Sadly, we don't have very much information on these from the habitat of Sumatra," he said, according to LiveScience. "We don't know how many are left. We don't know how long they live. We don't know how old they have to be before they bloom. We don't know how often they bloom. We don't know what time of year they bloom."
Yesterday, Trudy already started to wilt and stopped releasing its signature odor. Researchers at the Garden have been collecting pollen from the plant for study. The garden is extending its hours so people can get their last look at Trudy before they have to wait for it to bloom again.
