Something smelly a lure in Bogor

Something smelly a lure in Bogor

Peter Janssen, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Bogor

When a Bunga Bangkai (corpse flower) blooms at the Bogor
Botanical Garden, 40 kilometers south of Jakarta, it attracts
more than just flies, carrion beetles and sweat bees.

Last August, one of the garden's 10 usually dormant tubers
pushed up a flower that reached a height of 295 centimeters with
petals as wide as one meter.

The pungent blossom, which could be smelled at a distance of
100 meters, attracted more than 20,000 visitors to Bogor
Botanical Gardens, including Indonesian President Megawati
Soekarnoputri, said Jusuf Ismail, a guide.

The bloomings are a rare event, occurring about once every
three years at Bogor and a handful of other botanical gardens
around the world, such as in Sydney and Bonn, that are fortunate
enough to own specimens of the giant tuber plant, which is
endemic only to Sumatra, Indonesia's giant northern island.

The tuber, which goes by the Latin name Amorphophallus titanum
(or giant shapeless phallus), was first discovered in the jungles
of Sumatra by Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari in 1878.

Believed to be the largest flower in the world, the tallest
recorded fully erect flower reached a whopping 3.5 meters.

Beccari sent seeds of the plant to the Royal Botanic Garden
Kew where the first blossoming of the species in culture occurred
in 1889.

There have been only 11 recorded bloomings of the plant in the
U.S., according to The Huntington Library, Art Collection &
Botanical Garden website.

Blossomings in culture are rare and highly unpredictable,
given the natural life cycle of the Amorphophallus titanum.

"The tuber is usually dormant for six months to two years,"
said Yuzammi Yunis, an Aroid specialist at Bogor Botanic Garden.

The tubers, which can weigh up to 120 kilograms when mature,
send out a single leaf plant about once every four months, which
dies after a few weeks.

"If it is not mature enough it will just send out a leaf
again, until the tuber is strong enough to produce a flower,"
said Yunis.

Although Bogor Botanical Gardens has 10 Amorphophallus titanum
tubers in residence, only one has blossomed. The same tuber,
weighing about 100 kilograms, that flowered last August also
blossomed in 1994 and 1997, each time drawing thousands of
visitors to the garden.

The plant will only blossom during the rainy season, which
lasts from October to March in Indonesia.

The rare flower is not only remarkable for its size, and
shape, but also for its odor, which smells something like "a lot
of dead rats," according to Bogor guide Ismail, hence the
Indonesian name.

The stench, in nature, is to attract carrion beetles and sweat
bees to pollinate the plant.

Besides its pungent odour the Bunga Bangkai will also
literally let off steam between 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. at night.

"During that time the flower is ready to accept pollen and the
temperature inside the flower really increases, while the
temperature outside cools off at night, so that why it lets off
steam," said Yunis.

The whole blooming process lasts only two days. In the wild,
at least two plants must be flowering at the same time for
successful cross-pollination to occur, which helps explain why
the species is quickly becoming scarce in its native Sumatra.
Another threat is deforestation.

"A lot of forests have already been destroyed, so this plant's
natural habitat is threatened," said Yunis, one of Indonesia's
few Amorphophallus titanum experts.

Adding to the tuber's problems has been overhunting of
hornbills, which in nature eat the flower's fruit, which
reportedly don't taste as bad as the flower smells, and then help
scatter its seeds in the wild.

In an effort to help preserve the increasingly rare plant,
Yunis is researching its possible medicinal applications at the
National Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in collaboration with The
Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney.

"My duty is to find out what kind of value the plant has so I
can teach villagers to preserve them," said Yunis. At present,
the flower's horrific odor is not proving a successful survival
mechanism in Sumatra, where villagers are increasingly
encroaching the forests and see no reason to preserve the smelly
plant.

"They just cut them down," said Yunis.