>Titan Arums have a fairly long and unpredictable flowering cycle, and they can take up to a decade before they flower for the first time. Even mature plants can go years between blooms
Both are in California (one is nearly finished blooming), and the plant isn't native to the US
Most botanical gardens have a dozen or so, but they only bring out one that’s blooming when they think it’s a good year to fundraise. While it may be true that any given one only blooms every 20 years or whatever, in practice they’ll bring one out when the stock market is at its peak, or at a big anniversary year or whatever.
It's ~7 years give or take a few. I used to go see blooms at Foster botanical garden in Honolulu whenever they had one which was about annually, never experienced an extra fundraising drive. I don't really get why you'd choose to spitball on the topic.
As chance would have it, my daughter is at summer program at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University and she texted a photo from the greenhouse last week that the corpse flower there is blooming.
The appearance of the article on NPR seems to imply rarity of the blooms; but if anecdata says anything about it, it may not be…
I’m disappointed that I only learned about the bloom at IU after the fact; I’m just north of Indy, and I certainly would’ve driven down to see it.
I wish there were an app that would notify me when one was blooming within a reasonable distance. Something tells me the audience for such an app probably wouldn’t warrant the development, lol.
We are talking about individual flowers that are at least locally newsworthy whenever they bloom, I reckon that's pretty rare even if your average mid size botanical garden with a hothouse has a few plants.
> It's amazing, people come from all over the place. We had one bloom about 18 months ago and a guy saw it on the webcam in Texas and immediately got in his car so that he could make it for the blooming. And he drove day and night and got to San Diego 14 hours later.
My wife and I were in Washington DC back in 2018-2019 and happened to go into the Botanical Garden while out walking. There was a crowd gathered and we found out a corpse flower had bloomed there. It was quite a sight to see and the smell lives up to it’s name. It was a lot bigger than I expected.
