Titan Arum

  So yesterday I decided to stop by the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology greenhouse at Uconn, sort of on a whim.  They have a vegetable garden with some pretty exotic stuff and three huge greenhouses filled with stuff I could only imagine and I wanted to have a look. To nobodies surprise, I found that they have a pretty impressive collection.  What I also found, was that one of the "corpse flowers" was blooming, that night.  I had heard of the species, a huge flower from Sumatra that emits a scent similar to rotting flesh, but I didn't realize that the university had one.  When I asked about it and found that most plants bloom every three years or so, and of the recent news that one recently bloomed in Wisconsin, I realized I had stumbled upon quite an event.

  The flower was, at that point, starting to open and expected to fully open that night, and the staff said they were going to be there until 1 a.m and to come by and have a look, so I did.  The scent made itself apparent pretty much immediately upon entering the greenhouse, although it wasn't as horrid as you might be imagining.

  This rare spectacle actually drew a pretty large crowd.  NBC was there, as was a small crowd of people sporting Amorphophallus titanum shirts and talking about '97's bloom and the like snapping pictures in the dark.  I guess it was kind of a big deal.  The flower was pretty cool too, just the sheer size of the thing is fascinating.  Unfortunately I didn't think to bring my camera, it was at peak when I saw it, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  I went back in the morning though to check up on the progress and take a couple photos of it.  It had closed up significantly and the scent was receding.  I'm told it will begin to shrivel up and fall off before the corm goes into a year of dormancy.

Here's a video that the EEB department put together, a cool time-lapse video and the expert on the subject.
(click on the video for full size)

While this particular plant get alot of attention, there are also a lot of other cool plants at the greenhouse, many of which are currently in bloom.  I took the opportunity to snap a few photos of some other stuff that caught my eye, none of which I can name.