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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.
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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?).
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Despite sometimes being referred to as the “king of fruits,” durian is easily one of the more contentious foods out there. That’s because the stinky fruit emits an overpowering odor that tends to elicit intense feelings of love or disgust. But that’s not the only flavor you’ll sense in a sip of the pungent brandy. The spirit is also distilled from indole, an organic compound that can smell either floral or putrid depending on the concentration.
— New Hampshire-based Tamworth Distilling will launch their new Corpse Flower brandy next month. (Eau de Musc, a whiskey scented with castoreum, is available now, as is their Sierra Fig Cordial.) Read more in Spirit of the Times? This Distiller Made a Brandy That Smells Like “Death and Decay” at Robb Report.
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We needed it. I sat here in the evenings, because I was here late every night, and when I looked out over that and saw people dancing, I was like, “Wow.” I was texting my friends and family and telling them what joy it brought. To think that I could do that with a plant, I mean, talk about incredible.
— Joyce Rondinella, senior horticulturist at Longwood Gardens, on Sprout, the titan arum that bloomed there last month. Read more in What It’s Like to Care for the Mighty ‘Corpse Flower’ at Atlas Obscura.
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“What it smells like is a fish that went bad in the refrigerator,” said pathologist Judy Melinek, formerly of the San Francisco medical examiner’s office. She dropped by to sniff as a professional courtesy, as docs like to say. “A dead fish is a corpse, I suppose,” Melinek said. “But this is not the smell of a human corpse. It’s missing five essential esters.” [...] She also said the flower smells like sweaty socks, although she acknowledged she has not smelled 3,000 of those and is less of an expert.
— A pathologist investigates the odor of a titan arum, aka corpse flower. Read more at Corpse flower definitely smells like a dead body, but not a human one, expert says at the San Francisco Chronicle.