scarlet blooms!

Hello from back home in the Bay! Taking a short break from baseball horticulture (don’t worry, there will be more) to write about a local botanical wonder: the infamous, the pungent,

Scarlet the Corpse Flower!

Scarlet is one of several titan arum1 specimens at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. The resident titan arums (from my understanding) spend most of their time chilling inconspicuously in one of several galleries at the conservatory, either presenting as a single leaved stalk that looks like a small tree or lying dormant underground, building up energy to send up a massive inflorescence which will, for about 24 hours, give off a spectacularly rotten stench to attract specific bugs that will pollinate its flowers. Every few years or so, one of them decides it’s ready to flower, and the plant becomes a city-wide, stinky sensation! This particular specimen last bloomed in 2019 and 2023.

While volunteering at the botanical garden this past Wednesday, I got a heads up that Scarlet was about to bloom. Before starting our project for the day, our group leader Julie took us to a social event for the Gardens of Golden Gate Park, where we met the Curator and Interpretive Programs Manager of the parks. Scarlet was the hot topic of the day—they’d been monitoring her constantly, ready to drop everything and head to the Conservatory at the first sign of the bloom. It sounded like it could happen within hours, or maybe over the weekend, or maybe next week? The unpredictability!

Turns out Scarlet was ready to go off that very afternoon. I got an email at 4:17 on Wednesday (PSA: subscribe to your local botanical garden newsletter!) with the subject line: NOW BLOOMING. In retrospect, I should’ve made a point to go during after-hours that night or early the next morning, which is peak stink time. But Alex and I decided to take our chances and head over at lunchtime on Thursday, in hopes of catching a whiff of Scarlet’s rotting stench (a weird statement out of context, I know).

We’d already experienced this once before, back when we lived a few-minute walk from Golden Gate Park. Our memories were hazy, and we couldn’t recall the year or how we’d heard about it. Luckily, a quick search through my old iPhone photos reveals it was July 2018, eight years ago!2

2018 means it wasn’t Scarlet we saw, but another one of the Conservatory’s titan arums, Suma. But that time, we’d come too late. The corpse flower had bloomed on July 22 (see the timelapse here), and my photos are dated July 24 at 6:30pm. By then, the tall inflorescence was still standing, but the smell was long gone. It was still a wild sight: a singular fleshy column rising out of a magnificent red cloak like some crazy space flower.

This time we were arriving less than 24 hours after the announcement, so I was cautiously optimistic that we’d be able to smell the smell. I was also hopeful we might beat the crowd, heading to the park on a weekday during working hours (the perks of sabbatical!), but we arrived to find a line extending all the way around the front of the Conservatory and up the hill past the bathrooms. Who were all these people? Tourists? Retirees? Plant nerds playing hooky from work?

We had plenty of time to speculate while in line. It took about 45 minutes to get to the front of the crowd, during which time we saw plenty of out-of-towners, couples (usually it was apparent which one recruited the other to come along), families, and solo visitors. There was a table set up near the entrance with giveaways and a spinny wheel, which turned out to be hosted by the sponsoring organization, Cypress Lawn3. Once Alex pointed it out, I couldn’t get over the ingenuity of a cemetery sponsoring an event centered around a plant that smells like death. Props to you, Cypress Lawn. I caved to their marketing efforts and completed their interest form in exchange for a corpse flower pin, which was absolutely worth it. (I’ve learned this much working in marketing: people will do almost anything for a free enamel pin.)

Once granted entry to the Conservatory, we became part of a new line, which snaked all the way around three gallery rooms, from the Victorian Potted Plants to the Tropical Lowlands to the Tropical Highlands. It’s not unlike waiting for a ride at Disneyland, where there’s always a little adrenaline rush the moment you graduate from the outdoor line to the indoor line (complete with simulated nature sounds!).

Inside the Conservatory, employees and volunteers were set up along the way, as human interpretive stations. I recognized almost everyone there, including the Nursery Specialist who gave our Soils class a private tour of the Conservatory this past spring, and the Curator I’d met the day before (who informed us that the inflorescence of the corpse flower heats up to 90+ degrees to broadcast its odor). The horticulture world is both big and small!

One of my favorite educational stops along the way was a table highlighting other smelly plants. We sniffed a particularly foul-smelling orchid, whose flower also had the evolutionary trait of looking like a small creature (a mouse?) to trick bugs into thinking it was a dead animal. Alex described the smell as “Coop breath”—as in, how Coop’s breath smells after he eats a fish-forward meal and then yawns in our faces. I can’t think of a more accurate description than this.

When we entered the fourth and final gallery, the Aquatic Plant gallery, the two Gen Z’ers in front of us gasped as they were hit with a new scent. “It’s giving harbor, like you know, the smell when you go to the bay,” one told the other. I was pretty sure that was just the regular smell of the aquatic plant room, but when you paid to experience a stinky flower, any slightly different scent becomes noteworthy.

When we got within eight feet of Scarlet, we sniffed the air hopefully. Alex thought he caught traces of the same Coop breath smell, I got nothing. “Are you guys smelling anything?” the guy in the motorcycle helmet behind us asked. “I don’t think so,” I replied. “Maybe we’ll catch a whiff from another angle?” He apparently didn’t want to wait, and skipped the rest of the line to the exit.

The corpse flower is stinkiest at night, because, per the Chicago Botanic Garden, “that’s when carrion beetles and flesh flies are active and crawling about” in its native habitat in Sumatra. Even though those insects aren’t present in a controlled environment like the Conservatory, Scarlet doesn’t know that! She still put on her “perfume” for a big night out, then, pollinated or not, began to close up shop the next day.

So alas, we missed the smell again, but still got to see Scarlet up close, which was cool. The line made its way around her so we could capture each of her sides in photos. As we exited the Conservatory, people who had met in line wished each other farewell, forever bonded by our stinky flower friend.

Even though we didn’t experience the stench firsthand, this photo from our 2018 visit documented how others described it:

Lesson (re)learned: we’ll just have to book it to the Conservatory the first night next time so we can experience the dead fish/stinky cheese/smelly sock fragrance ourselves! I did appreciate getting to spend the afternoon in and around the Conservatory, which is beautiful itself and full of beautiful plants.

If you want to join our quest to smell a very stinky flower, titan arum blooms aren’t so rare that you can’t see one in your area! In the past year, there have been blooms at the San Diego Botanic Garden (on my birthday!), The Huntington (Green Boy! 💚), the New York Botanical Garden, and the U.S. Botanic Garden in DC (a double header!) Follow your local botanical garden to see when your local corpse flower is ready to make a stink.