Despite our existence in the "flyover states," there were many fantastic activities in Manhattan Kansas this weekend. The Bill Snyder Half-Marathon, for instance, tied up a number of city streets and traffic policepeople for most of Saturday morning. For those hip individuals in the know, however, the real attraction was the imminent blooming of a Titan Arum,
Amorphophallus titanum, right here in the Little Apple.
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.
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| Live Camera Feed 5/18/2018 |
Soon afterword, the digital wizards at K-State placed a live camera feed on the plant so that
extreme nerds onlookers could monitor when the actual bloom occurred, including a clock in the venue so you could see that it was live. Being the nerd that he is, ProfessorRoush bookmarked the camera feed and began checking it several times daily.
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| Image property University of Wisconsin |
The Titan Arum, native to Sumatra, is the largest inflorescence (made up of many flowers) in the world, the record for the "shapeless phallus" being 10 feet or so tall. This lime-stone-loving rainforest plant stinks like a rotting corpse (hence the common name) to attract the carrion beetles and flesh flies that pollinate it during its one-day bloom period. Every botanical garden that has one makes hay (sic) when it blooms, because of the crowd drawn to the stench and the fact that a plant takes 7-10 years of growth before it can support a bloom. Most recently, the
Chicago Botanical Garden's Arum provided some delayed gratification after several teasing incidents and finally bloomed in April, 2018.
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.
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| Titan Arum in full bloom, K-State, 5/19/18 |
On Saturday morning, Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I ran pell-mell over to see it in person. The stench at that time was not nearly so bad as advertised, but I'm told it was at its strongest around midnight the previous evening. According to the chemistry gurus, the odor is caused by dimethyl disulfide (Limburger cheese), dimethyl trisulfide, methyl thiolacetate, isovaleric acid (think sweaty feet) and trimethylamine (rotten fish). A regular one-day chemistry factory, this inflorescence.
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.
ProfessorRoush was away from his garden this week, key time lost in the prime, "not-too-hot and not-too-cold" spring clean-up period, but I was gardening frequently in my mind and occasionally taking a little sojourn from the conference I was attending to visit better environs. Can you guess where I was from the picture at right?
Well, if that wasn't a big enough clue, how about this picture at the left? Better? The first is the front entrance of the US Botanical Gardens conservatory building in Washington DC, the second, of course, the US Capitol building, the latter taken a few short hours ago as I was wasting time after the conference and before I had to skedaddle to Reagan International. I'm writing this from the airport at the moment, hoping to finish before my flight.
Spring is earlier here in DC by a week or two from Kansas. No cherry blossoms here yet, but this Star Magnolia (left) on the south end of the Capitol building was in full bloom, and there were a number of other early magnolias shivering but trying to open (right).
A wander around the USBG is a pleasant change from the cool damp Washington spring. I was tickled at the inventiveness of the USBG staff in placing "dinosaurs" into the foliage of their Primeval Garden, and I re-acquainted myself with old friends like this enormous Angel Trumpet in the Southern Exposure Garden (right). I even took the time to search out a non-flowering Titan Arum on display in the Tropics area of the Garden (below, the spotted trunk with the umbrella canopy). According to one display, the USBG has 24 specimens of the corpse flower in its collections, a wise move since the rare bloom of each draws visitors like flies to its flowers.
