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In the Australian city Geelong, just south of Melbourne, thousands are lining up for the rare chance to see – and smell – an unusual plant.
“It’s rank,” one visitor told CNN affiliate Nine News, coughing and gagging through his hand.
“It smells like dead possum,” a child said more bluntly.
It’s the so-called “corpse flower,” or Amorphophallus Titanum (often shortened to Titan Arum), named after the putrid stench it releases when it blooms to attract pollinators like beetles and flies.
However, it blooms unpredictably, sometimes just once every 10 years – and each bloom only lasts 24 to 48 hours, making it a highly coveted event that draws huge crowds.
This plant was only gifted to Geelong Botanic Garden in 2021 from the State Herbarium in Adelaide, South Australia, and for years horticulturalists have been watching and waiting for signs of a nascent bud.
The plant began blooming on Monday, November 11 after days of anticipation, with about 5,000 people arriving to see it that first day, Geelong Parks Manager Reese McIlvena told Nine News. So far, visitors have described the smell as similar to a dead mouse or a stinky pond, the city website said.
The botanic garden will be open all the time until Tuesday evening, when the bloom is expected to end.
For those who aren’t able to make it in person, the garden also offers a livestream of the corpse flower – which has racked up tens of thousands of views so far, with viewers tuning in from across the world, according to the city website.
Some visitors have returned multiple times to watch the plant at its various stages of blooming – the slow furling of the frilly leaf at its base, which will eventually close up around the tall yellow spadix at the center – an upright column with hundreds of tiny flowers at its bottom.
“As the Geelong Botanic Gardens opens its doors for this extraordinary event, we can appreciate the vital role that botanic gardens play in promoting rare and unique plant species,” City of Greater Geelong chief executive Ali Wastie said, according to Nine News.
“The endangered Titan Arum is the largest species of carrion flower and its preservation is important as the wild population is in decline.”
The plant is native to Indonesia and listed as “endangered” under the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Its native habitat of Sumatran forest has been ravaged by land degradation and deforestation, with much of the land converted into plantations for timber, paper or oil palm, according to the IUCN.
The plant can live over 30 to 40 years – meaning it only blooms a handful of times in its entire lifetime. The IUCN estimates there are only a few hundred of these plants left in the wild.
It is now legally protected in Indonesia, and dozens of botanic gardens around the world grow the plant to support its conservation, according to the IUCN – including one in California that the public voted to name “Darth Vapor.”
