| Plus |
|
|||||
|
A blooming odour Quietly, and without fanfare, a type of lily called the Titan arum started to swell and soar up towards the glass ceiling of the greenhouse complex, where some of the rarest and most exotic plants in the world are grown. After several years of careful nurturing, the Titan arum had finally mustered up enough energy to put on what Kew is delicately referring to as the 'greatest sexual performance of its life'. Growing at a rate of about a quarter of an inch an hour, the tumescence had soon reached a height of nearly nine feet, and began to unfurl. It was then that it became clear why the Titan arum also goes by another name - the corpse flower. It exudes an odour described as a mixture of 'rotting corpse and excrement'. Greg Redwood,
Head of Glasshouses at Kew, knows just how bad the smell can be. "My arms are covered with grazes where I've been scrubbing them," Mr. Redwood said. "The smell originates in a sticky, oily substance produced by the plant and you can't get rid of it. There's no way you can walk out of here smelling like that, so the only answer is to scour yourself. I was still retching last night at the smell." The last time a Titan arum flowered in Britain was in 1996, when another Kew specimen brought in nearly 50,000 visitors. Before that, a plant had last flowered in 1963. In 1926, police had to be called in to control boisterous crowds egging each other on to sample its foul odour. Although many specimens are held in botanic gardens all over the world, a flowering event is extremely rare; it would be very unusual for two Titan arums to be in flower simultaneously anywhere in the world. Native to the jungles of Sumatra, the Titan arum rarely flowers in the wild either. A colossus among flowering plants, it needs tremendous reserves of energy and nourishment to put on its unique show. So why does it bother and why does it smell so bad? Most plants
rely on producing a huge crop of flowers to attract passing insects. The flower grows from a corm, a swollen subterranean tuber that can weigh as much as 14 stone. In the steamy Indonesian rainforest, growing a flower is demanding work. In the confines of a greenhouse, it is an even trickier prospect. After bursting forth from the stem, a massive, phallic structure called a spadix, supported by a red bell-shaped leafy surround, becomes active. It needs to attract insects to ensure pollination - in particular two odious species called the sweat bee and the carrion fly. These, as their
names suggest, are not the most refined of creatures, happy to spend
their lives mucking around in the most disgusting, putrid substances
imaginable. The insects are lured into the flower's embrace by the promise of something unmentionable, and there they either pick up pollen, or transfer pollen from another plant. Male and female flowers - both are contained within the single bloom - are separate and mature at different times. The female flowers are receptive first, with the male flowers releasing pollen the next day. In nature, this timing ensures cross-pollination with another Titan arum flower; however, solitary cultivated blooms occasionally manage to self-pollinate. As carrion flies are rare in Kew, to make sure of sexual congress, the pollination is being carried out by hand. Hence Mr. Redwood's close encounter. For the last
couple of days, he has been carrying out the horticultural equivalent
of artificial insemination through a hole cut in the side of this
enormous flower, using pollen imported from a specimen in America.
If all goes according to plan, the Titan arum should soon start
to grow fruit - large glistening cherry-sized orange balls atop
a bright green stem. |
||||||
Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
