South Hadley, Massachusetts – Someone walked into the lush green Victorian-era greenhouse and smelled rotting eggs. Another said the smell evoked a memory of dissecting a dead bird. A third compared it to baking stinky diapers in the sun.
“I was expecting it to smell bad, but it smelled like rotting flesh,” said Nix Delprado, a first-year student at Mount Holyoke College, who visited the Talcott Greenhouse this week to watch the corpse flower bloom. “Her name is accurate,” Delprado added, laughing, his nose wrinkled.
The corpse flower, or Amorphophallus Titanum, is a rare tropical plant known for its unpleasant odor. Native to the rainforests of Sumatra, it blooms irregularly and only for a short time, emitting a pungent scent meant to mimic decaying flesh and attract pollinators such as flies and beetles. The plant nicknamed “bungee” bloomed for the first time at Mount Holyoke College in 2023, and its recent appearance has once again drawn crowds eager to view and smell the fleeting spectacle.
What appears to be a single flower is actually an enormous inflorescence, a cluster of many small flowers at the base of a long central column called a pollen and surrounded by a deep velvety purple layer. Although the towering blooms wilt after a few days, the plant itself survives underground and can bloom again in future years.
The plant’s notorious scent serves an important evolutionary purpose and has inspired a wide range of descriptions from visitors, said Tom Clark, director and curator of the Botanical Garden at Mount Holyoke College.
“A few people who have come since have described the smell as unbearable, fresh, like a trash can — overwhelming,” Clark said. “But that scent is there for a purpose. It’s there to attract pollinators, especially flies.”
The timing of corpse flower bloom is difficult to predict, often after years of dormancy. Over the past six weeks, the bungee has grown rapidly, sometimes rising several inches a day before spreading. The flower finally bloomed during Monday night, and he and other employees were greeted by its strong scent as soon as they arrived at work the next day.
“When we walked through the front door, we could smell it,” he said. “When we returned to the greenhouse where it grows, the smell got stronger and stronger. It was exhausting – literally unbearable – to go back there. If you didn’t know about this plant and you walked into the greenhouse, you would say, ‘What died in here?’
The spectacle has attracted visitors from near and far, including Michael Britton, who drove two hours and took time off to see the blooms after following news alerts for years.
“If you see a news article, and it’s from two days ago, that means it’s gone, so you’ve got to hurry up,” Britton said. He compared the smell to “stinky diapers left out in the sun,” adding that despite the smell, the plant was “bright and pretty and colorful. It’s a beautiful plant.”
Others found the smell more familiar than shocking.
“I would say it smells like a compost pile, or kind of like a working farm,” senior Carolyn Murray said. “I’m from Vermont, so I’m very familiar with the smell of the farm and the manure.”
Clark said the bloom highlights the broader mission of Talcott Greenhouse, which he calls a “plant museum” that houses about 2,000 plant species — a small fraction of the estimated 350,000 to 400,000 plant species worldwide.
“When someone comes into the greenhouse, it’s an opportunity to involve them in some aspect of the plant world,” he said. “When it comes to a very exciting plant like the corpse flower, this is a special opportunity to impress them with the diversity and some of the amazing adaptations that plants have to survive in their environment in unique ways.”
By midday Tuesday, the smell began to dissipate as the greenhouse vents opened, providing visitors with a less intense — albeit still memorable — experience. After a short flowering period, the plant will gradually deteriorate and collapse. Since corpse flowers cannot pollinate themselves, seeds will only form if pollen from another giant plant is available.
For student Namuna Negi, the fleeting nature of the flower added to the experience.
“I think it’s not permanent,” Negi said. “People like to be informed about what’s going on.” “If they hear something is going to die soon, they want to go see it before it happens so they can talk about it later.”