People are drawn to the smell of flowers, even when that flower smells far from sweet. In 2015, people stood in line for about three hours, just to get a whiff of The Denver Botanic Gardens’ Corpse Flower appropriately named “Stinky.”
The bloom boasts a stench said to smell like rotting flesh. The smell, intended to attract flies and carrion beetles for pollination, gets stronger in the late evening. The reactions to the bloom in 2015 were everything from excitement to people just gagging. Regardless, everyone goes on “Stinky Watch” when the Corpse Flower looks like it’s going to bloom.
The flower could very well bloom in all its rotting-corpse-smelling glory in early to mid-September.
Horticulturalists at the Gardens warn that there’s always the possibility that the bloom will be a bust, but the 18-year-old plant is enough of an anomaly to draw huge crowds that wait in long lines for a rare sniff of “Stinky.’
The pungent flower blooms only once every 3 to 15 years and the bloom only lasts 48-hours at the most.
The Botanic Gardens will be open for regular hours during the bloom, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. On bloom day, members can turn up an hour early to get the first sniffs.
