Corpse Flower Becomes the Star in Sydney

Travel23 Views

Jakarta -More than a decade later, the corpse flower finally bloomed in Sydney. The flower with its pungent aroma attracted the attention of thousands of onlookers.

Reported by Reuters, Saturday (January 24, 2025), the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney was swarmed by thousands of people curious about the amorphophallus titanum, also known as the corpse flower in Indonesia. The flower takes years to bloom, and no one knows the exact time it will bloom. And this flower blooms for only 24 hours.

This flower has not bloomed in Sydney since 2010. Of course, this moment is very precious for the people of Sydney.

Corpse flower at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney, Australia, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft) Photo: AP/Rick Rycroft

When the petals of the flower named Putricia began to bloom on Thursday afternoon, a long queue formed. Even visitors were willing to wait for up to three hours.

“The fact that this flower is very large, takes a long time to bloom, and smells very foul really attracts people’s attention,” said the chief scientist of the Sydney Botanic Gardens, Brett Summerell.

“I compared the smell to that of a dead possum,” he added.

Sydney resident Rebecca McGee-Collett, who waited for 90 minutes to see the flower on Thursday night. She said the flower was beautiful but smelled like garbage.

In November 2024, the corpse flower also captured the attention of the city of Geelong, Australia. Residents flocked to the Geelong Botanic Gardens to see this corpse flower.

Even the botanical garden went so far as to do a live broadcast to show those who couldn’t make it to the garden.

The corpse flower is a plant native to Indonesia and is listed as ‘endangered’ on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Its original habitat in the Sumatra forest has been damaged by land degradation and deforestation, with most of the land converted into plantations for timber, paper, or palm oil.

Here’s some information for travelers: this plant can live for 30 to 40 years, which means it only blooms a few times throughout its life. IUCN estimates that there are only a few hundred of these plants left in the wild.

Currently, this plant is legally protected in Indonesia, and dozens of botanical gardens around the world cultivate this plant to support its conservation.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *