h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

..but do people actually cultivate a plant that has flowers that smell like rotting meat?



Well done, anyway.

I happen to know of a Researcher who is oh-so-patiently awaiting the blossoming of her Dracunculus Vulgaris, a junior cousin to the Amorphophallus Titanum.

Perhaps a part of it is the successful cultivation and growth of something very 'distinctively different'?

This is a great entry
I have two stapella's which sit on my kitchen windowsill and have been known to take cuttings and propogate more. the flowers, despite the smell are very striking and well worth the aroma for a few days
I'm also the owner of the Dracunculus mentioned in the previous post

I didn't said nuthin' ... honest !!!

Hello, I'm the author! Thanks for the comments. I myself cultivate these flowers ... I am quite fascinated by the whole group! I live in South Africa and over here we have over two hundred different kinds of carrion flowers. The group is amazingly diverse! Only the bigger species smell bad ... but I would not miss out on having *them* in my collection just because of that! And really (well to me at least!) the smell is not that bad. I have the bigger ones growing outside where it's no bother at all. I used to have a whole windowsill of Stapelia kwebensis - a species with smaller flowers - in my room, and they flowered profusely, and you could smell it coming in from the hall to my room - but it was more of a 'spicy' sort of smell, to me not bothersome at all! But anyways, they are also outside now.

To me it's not so much a matter of having something 'distinctively different' ... since here in South Africa there are in fact lots of people who like carrion flowers and grow them in their gardens! I like almost everything about these plants, even the ways in which they attract flies! At any rate most species have very beautifully intricate flowers, which reward a really close-up look, smell or no smell. Apart from the flowers I like the appearance of the plants themselves as well ... they have a great diversity of sizes and shapes and textures and styles of growth.