Inflorescence

Dude, it's just a flower.

For the past week, much of Ithaca was gripped by Corpse Plant Fever. At Cornell's Kenneth Post Lab Greenhouse, a rare Indonesian titan arum, with the suggestive scientific name Amorphophallus titanum, had been preparing to bloom for a couple weeks. When open, the flower emits a strong odor of rotting meat. The bloom only lasts a day or two before collapsing.

The Cornell specimen is about ten years old. Since the beginning of March this year, the inflorescence had been growing steadily, as much as 2 inches per day, from about 3 feet in height, to almost 67 inches on Sunday. A cultivated titan arum doesn't flower until it reaches an age of 7-10 years, and there have been only 140 recorded instances of this event.

Last week, a webcam began showing the titan round the clock, and pretty soon, the town was all abuzz. Finally, after days of anticipation, the flower opened on Sunday afternoon, and people streamed to the greenhouse. By night, there was an hour-long wait to get in. Some people came from as far as Rochester, and the CALS Horticulture website registered a record number of hits.

I didn't get to see it until early Monday afternoon, and by then, the flower had already started to droop. Fortunately, the odor had faded too -- the sickly sweet aroma was localized to within a few feet of the plant, and it wasn't too objectionable. When it was at it peak, people smelled it from across the street.

Going to see the titan arum was like taking an odd pilgrimage. As I approached the greenhouse, I joined the throngs of visitors converging from all sides. I took my place in line and was handed a fact sheet. Apparently we were not the only ones to fall under the titan's spell: in 1939, a titan bloomed at the New York Botanical Garden, and it was quickly adopted as the official flower of the Bronx. The atmosphere in line was quietly festive, as if people came simply to acknowledge the unexpected grace that had befallen us. The greenhouse staff seemed exhausted but happy. After fifteen minutes, I arrived at the plant.

The titan itself has an otherworldly appearance, with a towering velvety, prehensile chartreuse spadix protruding from a billowing burgundy spathe. Lovely color combination. It would have been alarming were it not so beautiful. For all its impressive machinery and elaborate choreography, the product of millions of years of evolutionary tinkering, the titan's charm is direct and uncomplicated, and poignant for being so fleeting. More eloquent than an art object constructed with layers of meaning, divorced from human culture and compulsions, this giant flower simply exists, unaware of its own rarity.

By Tuesday morning, the wide skirt of the spathe was folded up like an umbrella, and the corpse plant had returned to dormancy. The greenhouse is no longer open to the public, and, as at the end of The Truman Show, the webcam has just gone offline. Like Halley's Comet, the titan arum blazed briefly across our collective field of view and left us full of wonder.

[This last image is a composite photograph of pipes in the greenhouse's ceiling.]