Rare corpse flower delights and disgusts visitors at Sacramento State

As students walked out of the chemistry labs at Sacramento State, their faces filled visibly with disgust. From three floors away, visitors could smell death and decay — a product of the rare bloom of Amorphophallus titanum, the corpse flower.

The huge and stench-filled flower made a very rare appearance at Sequioa Hall on Monday, much to the delight and disgust of students and staff.

The corpse flower, native to Sumatra, is the largest flower system in the world. Sac State’s is easily 5 feet tall, but the plants can grow up to 10 feet tall.

The flowers usually bloom every four to seven years, but it can take more than 10 years to see a corpse flower’s first bloom. The malodorous blooms last just a day or two, making them a rare botanical event.

This one, which has lived at Sac State since it came from UC Berkeley in 1996, has bloomed just once before.

Calvin Hy, a mechanical engineering student, pulled up his shirt collar to cover his nose as he entered the room containing the flower. Hy was early for a class upstairs, and smelled the flower on the way in.

“We’ll see how strong concrete is,” Hy said. “To keep out the smell.”

Hy wasn’t the only one covering his nose. Students and faculty alike filed in and out of the room to get a look at this rare flower, each with their own description of its pungent smell — a broken sewer line, dead rats, decaying fish, a hot dumpster.

“It smells like broccoli that’s been in the fridge too long,” said Daisy Yepez, an accountant for the university’s Associated Students, Inc.

So why is this flower so stinky? Daniel Pfarr, the plant collections manager at Sac State, said that it produces chemicals to emulate the smell of decaying flesh in order to attract insects to the flower.

These insects — mostly carrion beetles and flies — land on the flower and pick up its pollen. When they leave, they take the pollen with them, allowing the plant to spread its genetic material to nearby flowers.

A deep burgundy leaf, which looks like a giant flower petal, forms a cup around the tall yellow bud in the center of the flower. Deep inside the cup, about 100 purple stalks sit, waiting to receive pollen. Each of these is an individual female flower, Pfarr said.

While noses were crinkled, many of the flower’s visitors also expressed excitement.

“It’s awesome,” said David Unger, a Sac State chemistry student. “I’ve been wanting to see one of these for a long time. It was just shocking to come out of class four floors up and smell it.”

Hy jokingly suggested corpse flowers as an alternative to home security.

“Want to keep robbers out?” Hy said. “Put a bunch of these outside.”

But don’t fret that your neighbors will start to grow these for their novelty. Native to the rainforest jungles of Sumatra, the plant finds mild, dry Californian weather inhospitable.

The corpse flower at Sac State usually lives in the university greenhouse. As for its difficulty to cultivate, Pfarr said, “if you can replicate Sumatran jungle conditions, they’re pretty easy.”