The waiting stinks, but Sydney may soon enjoy the aroma of its ‘corpse flower’

Staff and visitors at Australia’s Royal Botanic Garden Sydney are hoping to see — and smell — a rare event that could come at any moment: the blooming of a giant amorphophallus titanum, also known as the “corpse flower.”

The flower’s Latin scientific name translates as “giant, misshapen penis.”

Visitors file by taking selfies of the flower as it sits on a raised dais protected by velvet ropes. The botanical garden has also set up a livestream so that everyone has a chance to catch the momentous bloom. On Wednesday, some 3,000 people were online watching “Putricia,” as the plant has been dubbed — a portmanteau of “putrid” and “Patricia.”

“People have become quite obsessed with her,” Daniella Pasqualini, the garden’s horticultural development supervisor, was quoted as saying in The Guardian. “She’s taken on a life of her own.”

The obsession is understandable. Sydney has been waiting for 15 years for a flowering at the Royal Botanic Garden. It will also be easy to miss — the bloom is off the rose, so to speak, in about 24 hours, experts say.

The plant is huge — measuring 5 feet tall. But it’s the aroma that really gets the public’s attention, says Emily Colletti, who tends the Missouri Botanical Garden’s collection of amorphophallus titanum.

When it finally blooms, the flower will have an odor “like rotting garbage or dead mice,” she says.

The plant is native to the rainforests on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and can grow up to 9 feet tall. Colletti says it blooms about every two to five years — up to five times during its life.

While there are “fewer than a thousand” of the plants left in the wild, “there are quite a number in cultivation,” Colletti says, adding that in some collections, there may be 100 plants.

Sydney’s specimen has “this beautiful reddish, brownish, maroonish around the edges of [a] frilly skirt, and that’s a good sign that it’s getting close to opening,” she says, but cautions that it’s often difficult to tell.

Despite the signs, things don’t always go according to plan. “I’ve actually looked at one … 20 minutes before it started to open and you had no idea it was going to open 20 minutes later.”

Two flowers bloomed in 2023 at San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers and the San Diego Botanic Garden. A decade earlier, NPR reported on one that bloomed at the U.S. Botanic Garden.