The titan arum looks like a giant yellow-and-purple ice cream cone wrapped in a frilly skirt. It can shoot up over three metres tall, making it the tallest flowering structure on the planet (though technically it’s a cluster of many tiny flowers, not one). It only grows wild in the jungles of Sumatra.
Botanic gardens get very excited when one is about to bloom because it might be five, seven, even ten years between events - and the bloom lasts barely two days. The plant spends those long gaps storing up energy in a huge underground bulb called a corm.
When it finally opens, the smell hits you. It’s a rich blend of rotting fish, dirty socks, sweaty cheese and dead rat. The flower even warms itself up to body temperature to spread the stink further, fooling scavenger insects into thinking they’ve found a carcass to lay eggs in.
