Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
HANOVER, N.H. (AP) — A flower that smells like a cross between a decaying animal and urine is set to bloom later this week at Dartmouth College.
Named Morphy, the titan arum — or corpse flower — hasn't bloomed since 2011. Officials at Dartmouth's Life Sciences Greenhouse, where the 6 ½-foot flower is housed, estimate it should bloom as early as Thursday. Crowds have already been filing through the greenhouse, including nearly 175 on Sunday for a special viewing of the flower that is growing about 4 inches a day in anticipation of its big moment.
As it gets closer to unleashing its foul odor, the flower will turn a red burgundy color — similar to meat — to attract potential pollinators.
"It's exciting that we have this flower," said Kim DeLong, the greenhouse manager at Dartmouth who witnessed a corpse flower opening when she worked at the University of California, Berkeley. "The smell is very overpowering. It smells like a dead corpse or feces or urine — all of that together."
Dartmouth has extended greenhouse hours this week and has a webcam streaming live images of the flower — including a few showing visitors trying to catch a sniff. Once it blooms, visitors won't have much time to catch a glimpse. It will only remain open for a day, though its smell will linger for a few days after that.
Titan arum is native to Sumatra's equatorial rain forests and is among the most popular flowers when it blooms. Huge crowds came to catch a whiff of the flower when one bloomed in July at the New York Botanical Garden and again in August when one bloomed at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C.
___
Link to the live webcam: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~grnhouse/morphy.html
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
