World’s Largest Flower, That Smells Like Rotten Flesh, Is Blooming In Kerala, India After 9 Years.

Visitors look at a blooming Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum), one of the world’s largest and rare tropical flowering plants, at Basel’s Botanical Garden September 29, 2014.

The flower, which emits strong odour likened to rotting meat, which gives it it’s common name ‘corpse flower’, wilts and dies after two days.

Both the ‘fragance’ and the flower’s meat-colouration attract pollinators – carrion flies and beetles.

For the last one week, hundreds of people are queuing up at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary at Alattil, near Periya, in north Wayanad. All this just to get a glimpse of the Amorphophallus titanum or the corpse flower, which is in full bloom right now.

The plant, which is native to Indonesia’s Sumatra region, had been grown from a seed planted about nine years ago.

The corpse flower, like its name suggests, emits an extremely foul odour, akin to the smell of rotting flesh. It survives only for 48 hours.