Creepy Corpse Flowers Podcast By cover art

Creepy Corpse Flowers

Creepy Corpse Flowers

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Wondering what to get that special someone for Halloween? How about a bouquet of corpse flowers? Of course, you’ll have to go all the way to Indonesia to get them. And it would be a very, very large arrangement. There are two types of corpse flowers, and both emit a strong odor of rotting meat to attract flies and beetles to pollinate them. Titan arum lives up to its name, with flowers topping 10 feet in height. To produce a bloom of such staggering proportions, it spends a few years as a small tree with wide sun-gathering leaves, storing energy in a giant tuber that could weigh 200 pounds. When the tuber is ready, the tree dies to the ground. Then, rising as if from a grave, a large, solitary shoot breaks the earth, growing 3 inches a day, then finally unfolding its petals like a cloak to reveal the largest, stinkiest flower in the world. The other, very different corpse flower, fittingly, is a parasite. It attaches itself to vines in the jungle, where the body of the plant lives within them, drawing all its water and nutrients from the host. Then, once in a blue moon, it will produce a huge, red, stinky, platter-shaped bloom on the forest floor—the widest and heaviest flower in the world, at nearly 4 feet across and more than 25 pounds. These denizens of the botanical underworld may not smell very good, but their spectacular appearances are a frightfully memorable sight.
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