Unseasonably warm temperatures across the Northeast have spurred many flowering plants – from Washington D.C.’s renowned cherry blossoms to the forsythia in Central Park – to blossom early this year. Darrow School’s famous corpse flowers are no exception, and are flowering now.
The corpse flower is an Indonesian plant, also known as the konjac arum (Amorphophallus konjac). It boasts the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world, and the third largest flower of all known plants. The konjac arum gets its name from its distinctive odor, which many liken to the smell of rotting meat. The corpse flower, a relative of the calla lily and the jack-in-the-pulpit, grows wild in the rainforests of southeast Asia from a large underground corm. The plant first flowered in cultivation in London in 1889. Fewer than 50 of the largest variety of corpse flower, the titan arum, are known to have bloomed in the United States, with the smaller konjac arum, typically found only in botanical gardens, museums and private greenhouse collections.
The large green bud of the konjac arum grows at a rate of about an inch per day, until it finally blooms into a central stem that can reach up to four feet tall, as well as a huge, purplish-brown blossom that resembles an asymmetrical collar. Its powerful fumes, which last for days, help to attract pollinating insects. After about a week, the plant wilts and goes dormant for its next phase, a branching, treelike structure.
“The corpse flower is a rare plant that is challenging to grow, and four are in florescence now, which has never happened before at Darrow,” notes Craig Westcott, Director of Darrow’s Samson Environmental Center (SEC), which houses the plants. “It wouldn’t be possible in this region without a facility like the Samson Environmental Center and the careful attention of both students and faculty.”
Built in 1988, the SEC features many green-design elements, from photovoltaic panels to wind turbines, and is the destination for more than 500 visitors annually from schools, civic and municipal organizations, urban planning firms and the general public. The SEC also houses the Living Machine, an innovative wastewater treatment facility that uses a natural ecosystem to clean wastewater from campus dorms and buildings before returning it to the Hudson River watershed.