The plant only produces its notorious stench when it blooms.

And when it does, the bloom is short-lived: The flower typically collapses after 24-36 hours. 'It's great for people to learn a little bit more about the natural world, especially something so extreme,' Rosengreen says.Ĭorpse flowers can live at least a decade or more in captivity, but they usually take five to 10 years to bloom, meaning a plant may only bloom a few times in its life.

(Oddly enough, UC Riverside and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo just saw their corpse flowers bloom, and UC Santa Cruz's arboretum and botanic garden is currently devoting its Instagram to updating the public about its impending corpse flower bloom.) In the United States, corpse flower seedlings have wound up in the hands of conservatories and universities like San Jose State, which see the plant as a valuable instructional tool and view their role in cultivating them as a means toward helping the endangered plant return to a healthy state in the wild. The population of corpse flowers has declined more than 50% over the past 150 years due to logging and the conversion of the plant's native habitat to oil palm plantations. The endangered plant is native to western Sumatra, and fewer than 1,000 still exist in the wild, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This week marked the first time a corpse flower has ever bloomed in San Jose and may be a first for Silicon Valley as a whole, according to local media reports. 'To me it has maybe a fishy smell to it also.' 'I have heard people say it smells like a rotting cow, like a feed lot for cattle,' Rosengreen says. Between the warmth of the room and the blooming flower's odor, which mimics rotting flesh in order to attract insects to pollinate it, the smell evokes various unpleasant connections. Inside the tropical house, a small greenhouse that replicates the stifling humidity of a tropical island, it's impossible to miss the titan arum, a 7-foot-tall plant known as the corpse flower (and in this case nicknamed Terry Titan). 'Several people just open the door, poke their head in and are like, ‘I'm outta here,'' says San Jose State greenhouse manager Lars Rosengreen. Photo by Julia Brown.Īfter being led up a secured elevator and down the hall of a nondescript classroom building on the edge of San Jose State's campus, it became clear we had reached our destination by the small group of people clustered in the doorway and the smell emanating from it. Titan arum, known as the corpse flower, in bloom at San Jose State University on July 27, 2022.

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