I was alerted to the potential bloom from Tuesday's K-State Newsletter, and I made a trip over to the greenhouses soon after that, so I would know where the darned thing was when I needed to get to it. The picture at the upper right is from that Tuesday visit. Believe it or not, the white line running into the bloom was the work of a chemistry graduate student who was taking a baseline sample of the air in preparation for the stench.
Live Camera Feed 5/18/2018 |
Image property University of Wisconsin |
True to the prediction of the local expert, Dr. Chad Miller, our Titan Arum began to bloom Friday evening, slowly opening to reveal its blood red center. Can't you just feel the excitement? The Titan Arum grows from a corm that typically weighs over 100 pounds and can weigh over 300 pounds, the largest corm in the world. When it blooms, the temperature within the flower rises to 98ºF, to better volatize the odor around the area.
Titan Arum in full bloom, K-State, 5/19/18 |
During our visit, I noticed this glass jar containing blue desiccant in the bottom and, upon inquiry of Dr. Miller, learned that he planned to pollinate the flower within the next hour. The pollen in the jar was from the recent bloom at the Chicago Botanical Gardens ("fresh pollen") and he was giving it more time to dry since it was a little moist and clumped. The male flowers in the base of the inflorescence open up about a day after the female, a natural barrier to self-pollination as the female flower has begun to fade at that point and has presumably already been pollinated. I didn't voyeuristically stay for the grand pollination, but I'm sure it was a satisfying moment for everyone involved.
ProfessorRoush is happy, however, a Nerd in Paradise as-it-were, to have finally seen a Titan Arum bloom, a horticultural bucket-list checkoff item at its finest. I had always wanted to experience the stench first hand, ever since I read about it years ago from Henry Mitchell, writing in One Man's Garden, who, having seen one in 1937, said "Sometimes you don't need to paint a picture, but should just stand there amazed at one plant..." and termed the Titan Arum a "miraculous thing to behold, and it didn't paint any picture, it just sat there by itself." Clearly, a thing worthy of missing the Bill Snyder Half-Marathon just down the street.