Archive: Around Town

Photo from Liberty Hyde Bailey Conservatory Titan Arum LivestreamCarolus, one of Cornell's two Titan arum plants, also known as 'corpse flowers', will again unleash its fetid odor in the Liberty Hyde Bailey Conservatory on Tower Road in the coming days.

"The flowering is brief – just a day or two – and difficult to predict," said Paul Cooper, the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station greenhouse grower who cares for the Titan arums and more than 600 other species of plants in the conservatory. "But the bloom is nothing if not memorable."

That's because the Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) – native to the jungles of Sumatra, where it is threatened by habitat loss – has a fascinating pollination strategy: It releases volatile chemicals that smell like a rotting carcass to attract flies and carrion beetles to transport pollen from one plant to another.

The plant also warms to more than 100 degrees, to help waft the foul scent up into the canopy so it can travel far and wide. Skunk cabbage, a related plant native to the Finger Lakes, uses a similar strategy when it flowers in early spring, often melting surrounding snow.

Titan arums also produce the tallest unbranched flowering structure in the plant world, towering higher than 108 inches (9 feet). The last time Carolus flowered, it reached 75 inches tall; as of Sept. 12, it already stood 92 inches – making it the tallest Titan arum ever grown at Cornell – and was growing about five inches a day.

This will be only the second time since 2012 – when Carolus' sibling, Wee Stinky, was the first Titan arum to flower at Cornell – that the plants have bloomed while students are on campus.

Since they reached maturity, Cooper has been able to coax each plant to bloom about every two years or so. The last time Carolus flowered, its timing was perfect and Cooper planted the corm outside in a pot in nearby Minns Garden. That was perhaps the farthest north a Titan arum has bloomed unprotected from the elements.

The conservatory is open to the public weekdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., but will be open later during Titan arum's bloom. Announcements related to Titan arum's bloom – which will likely occur in the late afternoon and into the evening – can be found on the Conservatory blog or through Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) Twitter feed and Facebook page about extended visiting hours the night of the bloom.

v15i35