A stinking link
What did Peter Sellers, Harry Houdini, Mel Blanc (the voice of Tweety Pie), Colonel Sanders of KFC infamy and Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles have in common?

And that was a very awkward segue into some news of interest to my readers here in Indonesia, the UK and, possibly, the USA.

Thanks to the Guardian Weblog, I have discovered that the plant that I knew as the Raffleasia is blooming in Cambridge. What can be seen is actually a Titan Arum, whose Latin name, Amorphophallus titanium, is very descriptive, 'Amorpho meaning shapeless, phallus meaning penis, and titanum meaning huge'.

Another one has recently bloomed in northern California at the UC Davis Botanical Conservatory. A description of one that bloomed last year makes interesting reading. Amorphophallus titanum, which is native to the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, spends most of its life as an underground stem called a corm. Once a year, the plant puts out a single green leaf that lasts about six months. Eventually, it puts out a flower shoot instead, hoping to attract flies carrying pollen from another of its kind.

In fact, US dwellers have quite a few to view. They have also bloomed at Bonn's Botanic Gardens and Kew Gardens in London.

Jakarta dwellers prefer to visit the Bogor Botanical Gardens to see the flower. These gardens were developed by a young Stamford Raffles before he went on to found Singapore and give his name to a hotel and a very slightly different flower.

Actually seeing one in the wild is very difficult, involving jungle treks in such nature reserves as Rimbo Panti in West Sumatra, a few kilometres south of Hotel Rimbo which is just north of the Equator. This is where I've only ever seen the remains of the Raffleasia, which reminded me of a deflated football. There's a picture of one here. The one thing missing, which, apart from its size, makes it distinctive, was the smell. It's not for nothing that Indonesians know it as bunga bangkai, the corpse flower.

And that's another link the five folk mentioned in the first paragraph have in common.

Cambridge 27 August 2004 

 

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¶ 2:50 pm