Sunday was a beautiful New Hampshire autumn day, which is why throngs of people decided to head inside and find out exactly how awful the smell is from the world’s largest flower.
At 10 a.m., when the greenhouse atop Dartmouth College’s Life Sciences Building opened its doors for an unusual Sunday session, at least 100 people were waiting, forming a line that stretched out the building, across the entry plaza and halfway down a hill. It never stopped; by Sunday afternoon, Greenhouse Manager Kim DeLong estimated that more than 3,000 people had visited Morphy, the school’s “corpse flower,” since it started blooming Friday.
Sunday’s crowd included Karen Nelson of North Conway, who was intrigued after hearing about the flower on a WMUR report (I guess local TV news is good for something). She brought her daughter, Sarah, and Sarah’s friend Samantha Provencher, both sophomores at Kennett High School.
Cleverly, mom had waited until they were 15 minutes away from Hanover before telling them that their secret adventure was visiting a plant infamous for stinking to high heaven as a lure to pollinators.
“I didn’t realize we were going to see something that smelled like it was dying,” said Sarah, who seemed underwhelmed as we waited our turn in the sunshine. I suggested she would be able to dazzle her science teachers with a report on Monday morning, which may or may not have piqued her interest. It’s hard to tell with teenagers.
Morphy is an Amorphophallus (hence “Morphy”) titanum from the rain forests of Sumatra in Indonesia. This plant blooms once every five to 10 years, depending on age.
Morphy, we were told by the many staff and students of the Life Sciences Building on hand to contain the throngs, first blossomed five years ago at age 8, but word didn’t get out because Dartmouth was in the process of moving the plant into the then-new greenhouse. This time around, the school got better publicity value from the rare event.
Morphy was about 7 feet tall when I visited Sunday, but she (or he; each plant has both sexes of flowers) will probably have collapsed by the time you read this. The blooms only last a couple of days, which seems like a poor evolutionary strategy but worked for millennia until humans came along.
These days the corpse plant is endangered because Indonesian forests are being cleared for palm-oil plantations. But the species is popular with arboretums around the world because it’s such a draw for the public. In fact, the Franklin Zoo near Boston also has a corpse plant that is about to bloom.
Enough botany; you want to know how it smelled.
Alas, not bad at all.
By the time I arrived on Sunday, Morphy had largely stopped emitting the noxious gasses that create its reputation, although smell did linger in the greenhouse. I hardly noticed anything despite deep sniffs, and it didn’t seem to bother anybody else.
DeLong, who was watching the crowd and occasionally prodding us to move along like a bouncer in a botanical bar, said the smell had been overwhelming at first, and also had varied over time. “Sometimes it was like dirty diapers, sometimes like dead fish,” she said.
Darn; missed it.
Even with diminished odor, however, Morphy is an astonishing plant. The enormous central pillar, whose shape explains why “phallus” is tucked into the middle of its Latin name, towers overhead, is surrounded by huge sculpted leaves that are big enough to hide a good-sized dog.
The greenhouse had cut a small window in one leaf so you could see the tiny flowers inside; luring flies to walk on these flowers and carry off pollen is the whole point of the stench.
The greenhouse owns another corpse flower, on display beside Morphy, but even though it is 8 years old, it is much smaller than Morphy was at that age and doesn’t seem likely to bloom for a long time yet.
When it does, however, I’m there – and on the first day possible. No way I’m missing a good gag reflex again.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek)