Giant, stinky corpse flower soon blooming in Golden Gate Park

Your nose knows it’s that time again, as the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers announced Thursday that another one of its enormous, foul-smelling, and highly prized “corpse flowers” is likely to bloom next week.

Nicknamed “Suma the Titan,” the specimen in question is ten years old but has never bloomed before. According the the conservatory:

The ten year old plant is a sibling to last year’s Corpse Flower bloom, Terra the Titan. [...] Its peak bloom, which is accompanied with a foul smell in the evenings, will last for only 2-3 days.

The bloom is renowned for its incredible size and the strong odor it emits. The scent is a deception device that tricks pollinators into thinking the plant is rotting organic matter. A rare spectacle, the Corpse Flower plant goes through years of dormancy and leaf cycles [until] has stored enough energy to bloom.

The announcement may come as a bit of a surprise to some, since corpse flower blooms are supposed to be rare spectacles that occur only briefly and years apart, but a number of them have cropped up recently at Bay Area institutions, including another foul flowering at the conservatory last June.

This is because institutions like Golden Gate Park’s conservatory and UC Berkeley have several corpse flower specimens on hand, and occasionally their blooms happen relatively close together.

Like last year, curious observers can keep track of the plant’s progress via the conservatory’s livestream.

Since Silicon Valley hasn’t yet granted us the power to smell the plant via stream, to see it live the Conservatory of Flowers—located at 100 John F. Kennedy Drive, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco—is open Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m.–6:30 p.m. Tickets are $9 (adults), $6 (seniors and minors), $3 children (5 to 11), wee ones under 4 are free.

An Indonesian oddity, the corpse flower is a rare and strange creature with an incredibly complex life cycle. Note that the tremendous blossom is not technically a flower but actually hundreds of small flowers that join together into a much larger structure.

Despite its monstrous odor, Bay Area residents love seeing the corpse flower do its thing, lining up by the thousands whenever one is on display. The conservatory will extend its hours next week to coincide with Suma’s time in the limelight.

Update: For anyone who is way, way too curious, the Conservatory’s observation page now explains the chemical composition of what creates the corpse flowers tremendous stink:

Dymethyl trisulfide: The smells of rotting onions & stinky cheese.

Isovaleric acid: The smell of sweaty socks.

Trimethylamine: The smell of rotting fish.

Methyl thiolacetate: The smell of cheesy garlic.

• See Golden Gate Park’s Rare, Terrible Smelling Flower [Curbed SF]
• Conservatory Livestream [YouTube]