Botanists across the US are trying to figure out why so many titan arums – better known as corpse flowers – are blooming simultaneously around the country this year.
This is super weird, because there have only been 157 recorded blooms ever between 1889 and 2008. But this year in the US alone, at least seven flowers have bloomed.
— Read more at America's pungent corpse flowers are all mysteriously blooming at once at ScienceAlert.
Weird! The titan arum is definitely strange, so this is and isn’t a surprise. 😀
After reading Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, and learning about her work to understand how plants and trees communicate, I have much respect for the effort that goes into answering questions like these.
The New York Botanical Garden has a time lapse video of their recent corpse flower bloom.
http://www.nybg.org/exhibitions/2016/corpse-flower.php
Thanks for this Tiffanie.