I would stand in line, but I’d avoid the line if I could. Maybe go super early or during the weekday or something. For me the stench is not the draw at all, but I can stand it for awhile. I mean, I survived a child in diapers and house-breaking umpteen dogs, some flower is not going to faze me.
The reason to go is the size of that flower. A flower that big is not just some plant, it’s like an entity. You can feel it dominating the space when you stand next to it.
It’s like the first time you see an African bull elephant. You just can’t appreciate the size and weight of the thing until you’ve stood there next to it. It’s an experience that affects your overall perspective.
Re: people wanting to smell it. When you get right down to it isn’t that every male? I used to have a friend who joked a lot about men being big four-year-olds. She said if you want the attention of every guy in a bar just bring in a jar of something stinky and dare somebody to smell it. She swore you’d have every guy in the place lining up and pushing to get near for a whiff.
I’d bet lots of those experiencing Amorphophallus titanum are not repelled by the smell, but find it neutral or even appealing. The variation in how people react to scents is remarkable.
I currently have a night-flowering Oenothera in bloom - an unusual variety whose flowers to me smell like a botanical lemon Pledge, with maybe the tiniest bit of bleach mixed in. I like it (it’s different from more typical sweet flower fragrance) but undoubtedly some would loathe it.
Mary Roach’s book “Grunt” has a section on attempts by the military (including the OSS in WWII) to develop a stench weapon to confound or embarrass the enemy. They kept running into problems developing an odor bomb that would have universal impact; there always seemed to be one or more ethnic/national groups that didn’t mind the scent. The most consistently effective and repulsive odor was Military Latrine.
A. titanum’s much smaller cousin Amorphophallus konjac is not only a worthy garden subject (the foliage is attractive long after the brief bloom season), but you could harvest and process it to make your own super-duper weight loss remedy. I see TV ads proclaiming a konjac-based supplement lets you eat anything you want but lose weight, and since it’s on TV it’s gotta be true.
Oddly enough, I would line up to see the stinky flower, despite my intense aversion to many every day smells. I’d think anyone who gardens as a hobby would be thrilled to see such a thing. Also, I assume it’s not like sitting in doctors waiting room or something; I mean you *are * in a garden while you wait, no? Hopefully there’d be other things to look at (and better things to smell) while you wait.
A couple of years ago one bloomed at the Franklin Park Zoo here in Boston, and I happened to be free to see it.
Unfortunately, that’s all I could do – see it. You have a very small window of opportunity if you also want to sample its characteristic aroma, whose effective lifetime can be measured in hours.
Still, it’s rare enough you get to see the flower itself, so I count myself lucky for that.
I tend to be into extreme sensory experiences, mostly when it comes to taste, but the opportunity to experience a stinky plant works for me, too. But I’d want to know that it’s stinky when I get there. If there’s not going to be any stink left by the time I get to it, I’d pass. The appeal of seeing such a thing in person isn’t that interesting to me. I know what they look like. It’s the sensory experience of smell that would make it interesting.
I’m with Filbert on this. Also, if it’s the “smell of death”, well, I haven’t smelled that before. And I hope I never have to. So it would be interesting, but not by waiting 2 hours for.
That seems kind of unusual. Never passed by ripe roadkill? Never found a pack of meat that has been accidentally left in the trunk of your car? Nothing like that?
I’ve never experienced “the smell of death” and in fact asked people here to describe it but didn’t really come away with a good understanding. I’ve not smelled old meat and if I come across road I don’t look or linger long enough to determine how long it’s been there, much less take a whiff :eek:
Want to be scientific about it? Take a couple of raw chicken legs. Put them in a ziplock bag. Leave it out on the counter for a week or so. You’ll have your answer. (I ran this simple experiment accidentally once by having a similar apparatus drop behind my chest freezer without my noticing.) As for your comment on roadkill, you don’t have to linger at it, you can smell it from a distance (see the recent raccoon thread.)
