EAST LANSING, Mich. — The “corpse flower” is alive at Michigan State University. But it won’t last forever.
The 5-foot-tall Amorphophallus titanum that flowered Friday for the first time in 15 years was expected to finish blooming Tuesday.
Mike Grillo, a Ph.D. student, tells the Lansing State Journal that the randomly flowering plant “looks like something meaty that’s dead” and seduces flies and carrion beetles by emitting a pungent perfume akin to the putrid smell of rotting flesh.
Portions of its large leaves are blood-colored.
“People think of flowers as being pretty and smelling nice, and that’s not always the case,” Grillo said.
About 500 visitors have viewed the plant, which naturally grows in equatorial rainforests on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Now, the spadix will die back to just a nub, and the plant will lie dormant for several months before regrowing, Grillo said.
Grillo said there’s no apparent environmental cue that prompts it to flower, so it’s nearly impossible to predict when that will occur.
“We can trick a lot of plants to flower, but this one’s pretty unpredictable,” he said. “There’s no real rhyme or reason. They kind of flower at random.”
