Roseville High Corpse Flower Set to Bloom

For anyone who loves stinky, disgusting smells – and who doesn’t? –  prepare to meet the Titan Arum. 

Located on ’s campus, the Titan, also known as the Corpse Flower, will shed its protective layer and share its beautiful but air-befouling blossom sometime this month.

“We call it a bloom, but it’s technically not a flower – it’s hundreds of flowers within the large spadix,” said C.J. Addington, a Roseville High School biology and physics teacher, and self-proclaimed “daddy” to the morbidly-named plant.

Using terms like “super cute” to describe it, it’s obvious that Addington loves his little flower, now all grown. And who wouldn’t love a plant that has to be cultivated for 10 years before it does anything interesting?

The plants are rare, growing in the jungles of Indonesia, where there aren’t many bees available to pollinate them.  So the Titan, as well as some of its smaller cousins, has adapted to invite flies to partake in the pollination process – an invitation that is created by the most disgusting smells.

“The plant has to give off a really powerful, nasty smell to attract all the flies in the area – it will have an odor of rotting meat,” Addington said.  “I have always been fascinated by plants, particularly smelly plants that are pollinated by flies.  There’s a whole group of this type of plant, and they smell like meat or some of them smell like rotting fruit.”

Addington said the Titan grows the largest blooms in the world, though he doesn’t expect his to be a record breaker. 

“There are records of blooms that are 10-feet tall, and the blooms can be so large that you can’t get your arms around them,” he said.

The Titan is expected to bloom around July 25, and the bloom will only last one to two days.  Addington hopes to open the school for public viewing once he confirms the date that the Titan will do its thing.

“I had hoped it would wait to bloom until the students were here in the fall, but it’s a living thing and it will do what it wants to do,” he said.

If area residents are familiar with the Corpse Flower, it’s probably because of . More than 3,000 visitors flocked to the foul-smelling flower when it bloomed recently.

But Addington said that blooms of this species are so rare, that scientists track where the plants are and when they bloom.  Roseville High School may be one of the first public high schools in the country to host a blooming Titan Arum, Addington said.

“They are usually found at universities, botanical gardens and large institutions – somewhere that has a lot of funding and a green house,” Addington said.  “Kids have enjoyed seeing the Japanese Corpse Flowers (Titan’s smaller cousin) bloom, but this will be Titan’s first bloom.”

Of course, because Titan blooms are so rare, the plants are typically given a name, once a bloom rears its smelly spadix. 

“I’m thinking, since the plant grew up here at Roseville High, of naming it 'Tiger the Titan' – but I’m going to have to run that by the principal,” Addington said.

Addington has been updating his Flickr account with photos of the Corpse Flower. See them here.