My Bloody Valentine: The Corpse Flower of Sumatra

A corpse flower by any other name would smell so sweet… It doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Amorphophallus titanium or corpse plant or corpse flower as they are often called, is certainly one of the strangest plants on earth and not exactly the kind of thing to give a Valentine.

Native to the tropical jungles of Sumatra, the corpse flower, or corpse plant, has the unusual adaptation of mimicking a carcass. It achieves this by producing a heady aroma of rotting meat and by way of the fleshy design of its dramatic bloom – colored with deep reds, purple and vermillion. The corpse flower’s carcass-like smell and appearance help to lure pollinating insects.

As if that wasn’t weird enough, the corpse flower is enormous, reaching heights of 10 feet, resembling a sort of real-life version plant-turned-monster from The Little Shop of Horrors – owing to it anthropomorphic grandeur. But the comparisons end there: the corpse flower is not a carnivorous plant. It does however alter the common perception of a delicate, diminutive, faintly sweet-smelling flower, and show how miraculous nature’s evolutionary incarnations can be.

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