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Amorphophallus titanum
Also called Corpse Flower, Corpse Plant
The titan arum is a giant tuberous aroid from Sumatra that produces a single huge leaf most years and only occasionally a very large, foul-smelling flower. It is grown mainly in botanic gardens, and home growers should expect it to be difficult, needing a large heated, humid greenhouse and a big tuber.
Amorphophallus titanum, the titan arum, is a flowering plant in the family Araceae. It has a large unbranched inflorescence, a tall single leaf branched like a tree, and a heavy tuber which enables the plant to produce the inflorescence. A. titanum is endemic to rainforests on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Its flower blooms infrequently and only for a short period, and gives off a powerful scent of rotting flesh which attracts pollinators. As a consequence, it is characterized as a carrion flower, earning it the names corpse flower or corpse plant.
Amorphophallus titanum first flowered in cultivation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, in 1889, grown from the single seedling that Kew received from Beccari. The species became the symbol of the Indonesian Botanic Gardens in Java in 1894. The first documented flowerings in the United States were at the New York Botanical Garden in 1937 and 1939. These flowerings can attract crowds of thousands of visitors, and in the 21st century also thousands on Internet live streaming, and inspired the designation of the titan arum as the official flower of the Bronx in 1939 (replaced in 2000 by the day lily). In the Botanical Garden, Bonn, the titan arum has been cultivated since 1932.
The number of cultivated plants has increased because the cultivation requirements for garden specimens are known in detail, and it has become common in the 21st century for five or more flowerings to occur in gardens around the world in a single year. Challenging cultivation constraints mean that the plant is rarely cultivated by amateur gardeners.
Amorphophallus abyssinicus · Devil's tongue · Whitespot giant arum
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Amorphophallus titanum by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
