Play It Again

 

The Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California is hosting yet another blooming corpse flower. Can you say “overkill”? This is their twelfth one.

Naturally they are livestreaming the blessed event on their u-tube channel. When I last checked it had 59 viewers. They have not enabled comments which makes it even more joyless than usual.

It’s time for someone to create livestream corpse flower commentary, just like the gamers do. I think The Ocho’s Cotton McKnight and his sidekick Pepper Brooks could be the right team:

Cotton: Wow, that makes 3 millimeters in the last hour alone.

Pepper: That’s right Cotton. It’s a towering erection that just won’t stop.

Cotton: And we’re getting wind now of a smell . . . a distinctive odor that resembles day-old roadkill.

Pepper: That’s what the bloaty stage is all about, Cotton. Pretty soon we’ll need barf bags.

Farewell, My Lovely

 

Here’s a new twist on the stinky grotesquery known to fussy writers as the “corpse flower,” but whose formal botanical name—Amorphophallus titanum— suggests something more delightfully vulgar.

It seems an A. titanum blossomed “in the wild,” i.e., outside the premises of a botanical garden. The site—a public park in Singapore—is not that wild, but it is in the vicinity of the species’ natural range.

Someone mentioned the site on social media and faster than you can say “Sam Spade” the plant was dug up and stolen.

Damn. There goes another plot point I had planned for a NickZollicker novella tentatively titled The Maltese Penis.

Now Showing at Ohio State: Plant Porn and Tuber Abuse

It may have other virtues, but from my point of view Columbus, Ohio, is best known as the HQ of Limited Brands, Inc. (restyled L Brands, for the moment). Sure, there’s also a football team there with a university attached, but honestly . . .

So it’s a big deal when Fox News calls attention to a non-athletic event in Columbus. And selling tickets to watch a plant grow pretty much defines non-athletic leisure-time entertainment:

Ohio State greenhouse watches 1 stinky corpse flower’s rare bloom, awaits opening of a 2nd

Two quibbles:

Firstly, corpse flower isn’t the plant’s real name; it’s a PR monicker. Apparently the direct translation of the scientific name Amorphophallus titanum is too rude for school, although giant misshapen penis pretty much captures the concept for me. Legend has it that David Attenborough came up with the sanitized name when he filmed his BBC series.

Secondly, how legit is it to call a flower “rare” when it has blossomed four times in two years, in Columbus, Ohio alone?

A 6-foot titan arum opened Tuesday to release its rotting-flesh smell two years after it first flowered. A second corpse flower opened briefly at the greenhouse last May, and a third is expected to open in seven to 10 days.

Thirdly, [Wait, you said two quibbles.—Ed.] [Zip it, I’m on a roll here.] are the folks at the OSU greenhouse behaving . . . ethically? I mean, left to themselves these Indonesian tubers go all giant penis every 20 years or so.

Spokeswoman Sandi Rutkowski says having three or four blooms within three years is lucky but also is a tribute to the skill of cultivators at the greenhouse.

Skill? What exactly are those OSU athletic trainers cultivators doing to produce 325 lb linemen corpse flower blossoms every two years?

A Smelly Misshapen Phallus Rises in Queensland

Another stinky, giant misshapen penis plant has thrust itself into the news, this time at a botanical garden in Cairns, Australia.  Yawn. These public events are becoming a little too . . . common. I’m looking forward to the first stalk-raising of Amorphophallus titanum to take place at an exclusive VIP venue—like the Playboy Mansion. The word would spread via Hollywood publicists and soon you’d have Charlie Sheen, Kanye West, David Hasselhoff, and Ron Jeremy posing in front of an enormous, smelly botanical phallus along with all manner of babelicious young things. Now that’s a photo opp. The piece in The Courier-Mail pretty much writes itself, with one exception:

Amorphophallus titanum, which means huge deformed penis, was dubbed titan arum by Sir David Attenborough in 2008. The BBC broadcaster did not wish to refer to a giant phallic flower on his family show.

How quaintly Victorian of Sir David. He sounds like the kind of guy who serves his dinner guests “chicken chests.” In fairness, titan arum is a legit informal name for this species; it’s other nom de jardin—“corpse flower”—is strictly of recent PR vintage. For some reason this reminds me of a fund-raising dinner I attended some years ago for the Sense of Smell Institute. I was seated across the table from one of the Big Name guests, the “sex expert” Dr. Ruth Westheimer. She sat with a blank expression, waiting for a chance to work the word “penis” into the conversation. Whenever she succeeded, she would stop and grin as if expecting applause. It was jarring the first three or four times she did it, then simply annoying. It was like having dinner with someone’s senile, foul-mouthed grandmother. Blecch. Speaking of wrinkly and disgusting, I know FirstNerve readers are dying to know the exact molecular composition of the insect-attracting rotten meat smell that wafts from the Giant Penis Plant. Well, the wait is over. Last July, Mika Shirasu and colleagues studied the hell out of a blooming A. titanum at the University of Tokyo’s Botanical Gardens. They have provided the most precise olfactive description I’ve ever read of it. 

At the beginning of flowering, a faint rotten fruit-like odor was detected occasionally. Then the odor emitted from the flower gradually intensified. During full opening of the spathe, a strong rotting animal-like odor was emitted constantly. . . . The odor became stronger with heat production from the spadix . . . After the peak of the spadix temperature, the inflorescence began to secrete a fluid from the spadix in which a rotten fish-like odor was sensed.

Truly an evolving tone poem of malodor. Shirasu’s team captured the volatile emissions and ran them through a GC-MS-O analysis. The rotten animal smell was due to dimethyl trisulfide. Dimethyl disulfide was also found, but not at a concentration that was perceptible to the nose. There were also stinky grace notes of methyl thiolacetate and isovaleric acid. Finally, the rotting fish odor of the secreted fluid was due to trimethylamine. None of the molecules is exotic—they are found in everything from cheese to cooked cabbage and stinky feet. What is impressive is that this entire collection of foulness is produced by a single plant over the course of a couple of days.