Stinkin' Up the Joint

Like moths to a flame, they came. From near and from far.  They waited for hours, sometimes until the middle of the night, to experience it.  You would have thought that John and George had come back from the dead so that the Beatles could perform together again.

Actually, though, the source of all the excitement was a bloomin' Corpse Plant at the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh. Indigenous to Indonesia, the Corpse Plant takes an average of 7 to 10 years to bloom and then the bloom only lasts for 24 to 48 hours.  It is so named because while it is in bloom it stinks to high heaven and smells like hell, and the smell has been likened to rotting flesh.

As you can imagine, all this had Phipps' curator of horticulture Ben Dunigan pretty excited.  He described himself as being like a father waiting for the baby to be born and the blooming of the Corpse plant as being the Super Bowl of the plant world.  They named the plant Romero after George Romero, the director of Night of the Living Dead  which of course was filmed in Pittsburgh (Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/corpse-flower-romero-blooms-at-phipps-700083/#ixzz2cydjqe4N)

This may have been a dream for the botanists, but it could have been a nightmare for the good folks working in marketing and public relations at the Phipps.  I mean, would this awful-smelling plant keep folks away from the place during some peak summer hours?  

But it's all about the spin.  Like a modern day P.T. Barnum or Tom Sawyer getting the town's boys to line up to whitewash the fence, Phipp's marketing department promoted the living daylights out of this unlikely attraction.  The blooming of Romero was heralded with ads telling you that this was your once-in-a-lifetime chance to see and smell this plant.  They threw a big party and stayed open late, and even had the foresight to save some of the smelly nectar for people to smell so as to extend the fun for a few days after the bloom had faded.  And the people came, hundreds at them at a time.  Grow it and they will come.

Despite my admiration for this stellar public relations effort, I never once considered joining the hordes to visit the plant.  For one thing, the bizarre-looking Titan Arum (its real name) looked vaguely familiar to me.  I realized that I had seen its cousin playing Audrey 2, the man-eating plant in a few productions of Little Shop of Horrors.  Lending to this illusion is the spadix that leaps from the leafy structure (http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/stink-plant-stink.htm) which one visitor compared to a ballerina's leg, but at first glance resembled another anatomical appendage to me.  

But mostly it's the smell that kept me away.  Although some of my senses (such as vision and hearing) have started to fade with age, my sense of smell has remained as ever-sharp and particularly acute as it's always been.  I can smell a smell a mile away.  I am surprised I didn't smell Romero from my house in the North Hills.

I spend a fair portion of my time trying to avoid the noxious smells all around me. I buy products to clear the air in the bathroom.  We do laundry to remove smells from our clothes.  We're constantly in the kitchen wondering where that smell is coming from so that we may remove it.  Is it the garbage, or something in the trash disposal, or what? Mice sometimes like to die in the walls of the building where I work.  I have smelled every bad odor used to describe the stench emitted by the Corpse Plant, so why would I make a special trip to stand in line to smell this plant? 

My friend Mamie, who was kind enough to allow me to use her photos here, waited in line for three hours to see Romero, with her baby (who is just a few months old and who loved the sights and sounds of the Conservatory but slept through the actual viewing and smelling) in tow.  She assures me that it was worth every minute, and that is the general consensus among those who made the pilgrimage.

I wondered why the plant smells so bad.  It turns out that the stench attracts insects which is necessary for pollination, given its very short blooming period (Ibid).   It seems the stench also inexplicably attracts people, too! Either that or the marketing professionals at Phipps deserve a bonus.