Americans flock to admire the giant corpse flower that blooms only once every 10 years

More than 1,000 people flocked to an abandoned gas station in the San Francisco Bay Area (USA) to admire a corpse flower, the type named for the stench it gives off when it blooms.

The scientific name of the corpse flower is Amorphophallus titanum. Photo: AP According to the Guardian (UK), Mr. Solomon Leyva, the owner of a nursery in Alameda, who deals in exceptionally rare plants, posted on social media about his corpse flower. When he saw that many people were interested in the giant flower tree in full bloom, he decided to share the rare plant with the people around him. Earlier this week, Leyva took the corpse flower to an abandoned gas station so more people could admire it. Suddenly, long lines of people flocked to see this flower firsthand, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “I took the car, went down to the greenhouse, put the flower in the car with the help of a friend, drove here and people started coming to see it,” Leyva said. Leyva relaxed on a camping chair at the old gas station and patiently answered the same questions over and over again. He estimated that by 4 p.m., at least 1,200 people had come to admire the flower. “People said that when a similar flower was displayed in San Francisco earlier, they had to wait for hours to see the flower through a fence. They are not allowed to get close,” Leyva shared. “I think everyone wants to get up close, shake and smell the flower.” People lined up to admire the rare corpse flower in Alameda. Photo: AP Couple Himanshu and Sayali Jain brought their 3-year-old son here after a photo of the flower was posted on social media. “I just wanted to thank him, because I thought we would never see it,” Sayali Jain said. The carrion flower is the rarest and largest flowering plant in the world, first discovered in Sumatra, Indonesia in 1878, by the Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari. The tree only grows in the wild on steep hillsides 365 meters above sea level. This flower is famous for its scent and color similar to rancid flesh when blooming. According to the American Botanical Garden, the corpse flower is extremely rare, with nearly 1,000 species remaining in the wild. It can grow up to 3.6 meters tall and takes about a decade to bloom. During that time, it secretes an unusual odor to attract pollinators, and then dies within a few days. In 2016, visitors to a corpse flower at the New York Botanical Garden described its scent very differently. Many people say that corpse flowers have 5 scents: sweat, garlic, decomposing meat, human excrement, and rotting fish.