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Rafflesia
Rafflesia is a genus of parasitic plants in the Rafflesiaceae, famous for huge, foul-smelling flowers. They have no stems, leaves or roots and live entirely inside Tetrastigma vines in Southeast Asia, so they cannot be grown like ordinary garden plants.
Rafflesia (), or stinking corpse lily, is a genus of parasitic flowering plants in the family Rafflesiaceae. The species have enormous flowers, the buds rising from the ground or directly from the lower stems of their host plants; one species has the largest flower in the world. Plants of the World Online lists up to 41 species from this genus; all of them are found in Southeast Asia.
Western Europeans first learned about plants of this genus from French surgeon and naturalist Louis Deschamps when he was in Java between 1791 and 1794; but his notes and illustrations were seized by the British in 1798 and were not available to Western scientists until 1861. The first British person to see one was Joseph Arnold in 1818, in the Indonesia rainforest in Bengkulu, Sumatra, after a Malay servant working for him discovered a flower and pointed it out to him.
Species of Rafflesia are all thought to be holoparasites of lianas of the genus Tetrastigma, vines which belong to the Vitaceae, the family of the grape vines. They are thus, in a way, hyperparasites, because Tetrastigma are themselves, in a way, structural parasites of the trees they use to climb up to the light. Rafflesia appear to be species-specific, with each Rafflesia species naturally only growing on one to three species of Tetrastigma. Of the 57 known species of Tetrastigma, only ten are known to be host plants. Of the 30 odd species of Rafflesia, the host plants are only known from about half of the species. A certain species of Tetrastigma is very popular among Rafflesia: T. tuberculatum is a host plant for at least 15 species, and only two Philippine species are not known to infect it. T. papillosum and T. diepenhorstii both host at least two species. The flowers may bud from different locations; R. cantleyi flowers from the vine some two meters from the ground, whereas R. zollingeriana always buds out of the roots and appears out of the ground.
In Thailand, the buds and flowers of R. kerrii are considered a delicacy. They are also harvested for herbalism, a concoction is believed to act as a sexual stimulant and to help for fever or backache. In the Philippines, the plants are also used in folk herbalism, but the flowers are also fed to swine as fodder. On Java, the buds of R. zollingeriana are harvested and dried for use in jamu, the ancient traditional herbalism of the island. It is unknown for what the buds are supposed to be good for; jamu concoctions are often complex mixtures and often are supposed to help with sexual prowess.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Rafflesia 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.
