Myriad Botanical Gardens Prepare For Rare Plant To Bloom

A rare plant is about to bloom at the Myriad Botanical Gardens, and it only happens about once a decade. 

Anyone who goes to see the bloom will quickly learn it smells about as weird as it looks.

"There's no other flower quite like this so it's really exciting," said Director of Horticulture at the Myriad Gardens, Nate Tschaenn.

It sits in the Myriad Gardens lobby surrounded by ferns, the titan arum; commonly known as the corpse flower.  

Experts expect the long-awaited bloom to happen in the next seven to ten days.

"I've been growing this one for nine years. It usually takes between seven and ten years to get a flower, so it's about right on schedule," explained Tschaenn.

This flower is not the average garden variety.  

It's native to Sumatra and is the biggest, unbranched cluster flower in the world.  

When it blooms, it only opens for a day and anyone who happens to walk by while it's open won't be able to ignore this flower named Crystal.

"Kind of the oxymoron that it is the like fact that it is a very exciting time for it to bloom but it also is not - it smells like a corpse. Yeah, not the most pleasant smell," said Lilly Forth and Nolan Hill. The Hill added, "The fact that it only blooms for like a day makes it even more rare that you've got to come. Why not?"

The smell may be off-putting to people, but the putrid stench attracts the plant's pollinators, flies and beetles.

"Well, they're tricked to going down into the middle of the flower. The flower's got this reddish, kind of maroon color to it which attracts them, so they think it's meat," explained Tschaenn.  

He added, "it actually heats up on the inside of the flower to make it think it's something warm and decomposing."

Now, staff anxiously wait as the stinky bloom creeps closer.

"It tends to open at nighttime, we're making plans to be open late at night so there's a lot of logistics for us to figure out," said Tschaenn.

The Myriad Botanical Gardens will post daily corpse flower updates to its website and social media pages.