If you’re around Chicago, any day now you can witness a corpse flower in bloom, a rare event. A titan arum named Spike is getting ready at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Read all about it at the garden’s special Spike 2.0 web page.
I saw a titan arum at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in 2010. These huge flowers famously smell horrible, like a rotting corpse — or if you’ve never experienced that, like very old garbage. That’s how it attracts carrion beatles and flesh flies to pollinate the flower.
If you can’t make it, there’s a live webcam on the web page, also here at YouTube.
Enjoy your visit, and hold your nose.
Semiosis 