HOUSTON — The flower girl at Jessica Zabala’s wedding is purple, 6 feet tall, uninvited and smells like dead bodies.
She is Lois, a rare “corpse flower,” deemed the world’s stinkiest bud. Lois is unexpectedly blooming in the Houston Museum of Natural Science, in the room right next to where Zabala was marrying Jonathan Smith on Saturday.
“I don’t need a florist anymore,” Zabala said, laughing. “I’ve got Lois.”
The flower is an Amorphophallus titanum, which has bloomed only 29 times in the United States. It has happened twice in Texas but never before at the museum’s Cockrell Butterfly Center, which hosts about 50 weddings a year.
Deforestation has left the flower endangered in its native rain forests of Sumatra, Indonesia, said Nancy Greig, the butterfly center’s director. Six years ago, the center paid $75 for a “little walnut- sized tuber.”
Lois was two-thirds of the way to full bloom Thursday. She will stay open about two days.
