The Corpse Flower
On the first day after we got to Oahu, we were dead tired. We had woken up at 4AM EDT to drive to JFK for our flight at 9AM, flown for 10 hours, and then landed at 1PM HST, which was 6 hours behind.
After forcing ourselves to be out and about for a little while, we called it a day early and went back to the hotel room to laze around. I turned on the TV and went to the local news channel. They were talking about how the corpse flower at the Foster Botanical Garden would be open tomorrow. Huh! I had had some vague impression that this was an extremely rare and stinky event; upon looking it up, I did see that these things bloomed for a single day once every few years. Neither Rob nor I had ever seen one, and we were highly interested.
We certainly hadn't come to Hawaii with the goal of seeing a corpse flower, but the next morning, we beelined to the garden as soon as they opened. The parking lot was nearly full already, and it seemed like the garden knew what a special event this was, as there were signs everywhere specifically directing us to the line to see the corpse flower.
It didn't take too long to get to the front of the line to get our turn with the absolutely massive amorphophallus titanum flower. Even from far away, you could see the swarm of flies around it. The smell hit me before it hit Rob, and man, was it a smelly smell. I held my breath and took a close look at the bloom as the flies swarmed around me. The thick phallic protrusion with the dark purple petal dress was honestly kind of sinister looking. We took the obligatory photo where I held my nose and then let the next person in line up.
Walking around the greenhouse, we learned about how the plant sprouts one single giant leaf as tall as a tree, and how that leaf repeatedly dies back and sprouts anew from the tuber until it decides to flower and produce seeds. Moreover, the flower actively produces heat and sends out its scent in waves. In the back of the greenhouse, we saw a whole little nursery full of baby amorphophallus titanum plants with their leaves of varying heights. What a completely fascinating plant - I find the whole lifecycle and flower to be a particularly strange evolutionary product. It's funny to think about these naturally growing and being stinky in their native Sumatran rainforest. Tropical life is wild.
After that, we walked around the botanical garden for a little while longer and then left to see more of Hawaii. I thought it was a great use of an hour, and what a coincidence it was that this plant just happened to bloom while we were there.