Standing five feet away, I could smell it in the air. Acrid, damp, toe-curling—a memory from my past. The nose is a powerful historian, so it took only a few seconds to place it: the stench of the rat that died in the walls of my second apartment in New York City. Because management was hesitant to punch a hole in the sheetrock to retrieve it, the corpse dried out slowly, rendering one bedroom unlivable as my roommate slept on the sofa and recouped a few weeks of rent. It had been a long time since I smelled that smell. Most Proustian reveries originating in Bushwick won't transport you anywhere you want to go.

— Read more in A Stinky Pilgrimage To The Corpse Flower, With Notes Of Rat, Sweat, And Cheese at Defector.

But to fans of this specimen, she’s Putricia -- a portmanteau of “putrid” and “Patricia” eagerly adopted by her followers who, naturally, call themselves Putricians. For a week, she has graced a stately and gothic display in front of a purple curtain and wreathed in mist from a humidifier at the Royal Sydney Botanic Garden.

Her rise to fame has been rapid, with up to 20,000 admirers filing past for a moment in her increasingly pungent presence.

— Read more in A blooming plant that reeks of gym socks and rotting garbage has thousands lining up for a whiff at AP News.

The corpse flower isn’t doing much better in its native home of Sumatra, where its numbers are dwindling because of deforestation for lumber and crops. In 2018, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the plant as endangered. There are fewer than 1,000 individuals still in the wild.

— Read more in The Corpse Flower Is Not in the Mood: Saving the world’s stinkiest plant would be easier if it had any interest in reproducing at The Atlantic.

Efforts to conserve the corpse flower are taking center stage in an initiative led by the Chicago Botanic Garden to increase rare plants’ odds of survival by maximizing their genetic diversity. The project will apply breeding principles used by zoos to conserve animal species to six plants that are perilously close to extinction, hopefully proving methods that could be applied to many other plants.

— Read more in How to Save Phallic Flowers From Being Inbred to Extinction at The New York Times (and see also, the older article Why Is the Corpse Flower So Stinky?).