Tuesday 18 April 2017

This Is A Post About A Plant That When In Flower,

emits the aroma reminiscent of, and here I quote, ‘a thousand dead elephants rotting in the sun,


 when this specimen of Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis, affectionately known as Bucky flowered, the aroma was so intense it closed a whole greenhouse at the Smithsonian Gardens making the greenhouse almost uninhabitable for a few days,

the plant is also mentioned in the list of 9 of the worst smelling flowers in the world, fame indeed, a little about Bucky, the plant was donated to the Smithsonian Gardens last July, liking its pendant glossy leaves and their resemblance to a beaver’s tail, donors Lynn Cook and Troy Ray of Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, dubbed it ‘Bucky;’ a name that lives on among Smithsonian horticulturalists now caring for the new plant, at the time it was originally acquired a couple of decades ago, few people outside of Asia had seen this species, though many had read about it and its remarkable ecology, the inflorescence, or flower head, consists of a cluster of about 15 to 20 reddish-brown (meat-coloured) flowers covered with fleshy projections called papillae that are said to resemble wriggling maggots, keeping to plants that give off rotten meat smelling aroma, also on the list of 9 was one of Diana's stinky cactus, 

Stapelia gigantea, I am not sure if it is good or bad news when I say it has not yet flowered!


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