One of them can be found at the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco, while the other is at the San Diego Botanic Gardens. It's worth noting that these flowers bloom very rarely and are considered quite uncommon. Not to mention their odor is quite potent and gag inducing while in bloom.
From NPR:
The Conservatory's corpse flower is named Scarlet, and last bloomed in 2019. She began blooming again earlier this week, and is still standing tall for her many visitors in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
San Diego's flower du jour last bloomed in 2021, and is already noticeably more shriveled than the peak event earlier this week. That's because corpse flower blooms are brief, shining, stinky moments in time, typically lasting just a couple days.
What are people saying? Ari Novy, president and CEO at the San Diego Botanic Garden, spoke to NPR's Daniel Estrin about witnessing the symphony of stench in real time.
His own description of the corpse flower's perfume:
The way I describe it is it smells like if you took your teenager's dirty laundry and you put it in a big black garbage bag, and then you added in some hamburger meat, maybe some fish, a little garlic and some parmesan cheese. And you left that by the side of the road on a very hot desert day for about 24 hours. And then you came back to it. That's not even exaggerating. That is really what the smell was.
What's fascinating is that the scent of this flower is an evolutionary marvel. Numerous insects are naturally drawn to the aroma of decaying flesh, and the corpse flower has cleverly imitated that scent to increase its chances of pollination.
It's really a genius strategy...
