An arum by any other name would smell as rank - so it's just called the corpse flower

Crowds flocked to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden recently to see what the big stink was about - the rare blooming of a cultivated amorphophallus titanum, one of the world’s largest flowers. It also is perhaps the world’s most foul-smelling plant and puts out an aroma not unlike rotting meat or fish.

“I had to wear a respirator,” said Alessandro Chiari, a plant propagator who, along with garden foreman Mark Fisher, raised the flower from a pea-sized tuber to maturity at more than 5 ft.

“It comes in waves,” Chiari said of the plant’s foul smell, which serves the purpose of attracting hungry bees and insects that pollinate its female flowers. The plant, also called a titan arum, does not pollinate itself.

The last time a titan arum, native to Sumatra, bloomed in New York was in 1939, garden officials said. Only a handful have flowered in the United States in the past few decades.

Like many of nature’s most spectacular feats, the corpse flower’s blooming will be short-lived and the plant is expected to collapse in another day or two.