Officials at Southwestern College said more than 1,500 people traveled to the campus in Winfield for the chance to see — and smell — a titan arum.
The rare plant is famed for its unusual size and smell. The aroma, released by the plant’s bloom, is a rotten smell that has earned the plant the title of "corpse flower."
Sightseers who visited the Southwestern College greenhouse on Monday agreed the smell is bad, but offered other descriptors for the scent.
Ten-year-old Ellis Pipes-Ternes and 9-year-old Hayes Pipes-Ternes both suggested “dead fish” as an equivalent for the smell. Their brothers, 12-year-old Ames and 7-year-old Hart, threw out “pond water.”
Emmy Pipes-Ternes,16, asked 5-year-old sister Percy for her best description.
“Ummmm, cat poop,” Percy said.
Their mother, Sally Pipes-Ternes, had her own idea.
“I thought it smelled like stinky shoes,” she said. “Having this many kids, I’ve come in contact with many stinky shoes.”
Fans of Southwestern College's titan arum, called "Jinx," have been waiting for an opportunity to get a whiff of the plant for at least a week. In early June, the plant’s spathe — the bell-shaped structure of the bloom — began signaling it would flower.
Staff at the college’s Ruth Warren Abbott Greenhouse set up a livestream on June 8, anticipating Jinx would bloom in a couple days.
That prediction created a frenzied watch party online.
Charles Osen, a spokesperson for the college, had the task of updating the livestream and local media as greenhouse staff observed Jinx and shifted their forecast for the bloom. Over the course of the week, the tone of his updates went from excited, to hopeful, to something more restless.
“I wasn’t around campus yesterday when they texted me that it was starting to bloom,” he said. “I said, ‘Thank the Lord!’”
Osen’s anticipation and relief were mirrored in the comments on the livestream. Viewers as far away as Australia said they were counting down to the bloom — cheering the plant on while they compared it to another titan arum on the cusp of blooming at the University of Rhode Island.
Titan arums have developed a following because they’re increasingly rare to behold.
The corpse flower is native to Sumatra, Indonesia. Since 2018, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources has listed the plant on its red list of threatened species. Deforestation has brought on rapid population decline, and it’s estimated that fewer than 1,000 of the plants remain.
It’s a major obstacle for the survival of a plant that takes years to mature. The titan arum starts as a corm or tuber and needs several years to gather enough energy to leaf. It then has several leaf cycles before it’s able to bloom. All that work means that a titan arum may produce only one or two blooms a decade in a lifespan that averages about 40 years.
And those blooms are brief, lasting only about 24 to 48 hours before they wither and fall away.
Many in the crowd at Winfield knew that catching a titan arum in flower was a treat. They surrounded Jinx and filled the college’s auxiliary greenhouse. Their quest to smell or photograph the plant brought them side by side with the man responsible for the moment — retired biology professor and outgoing greenhouse director Max Thompson.
Thompson, 91, is a nationally renowned judge of orchids. He and his students built the college greenhouses around the 1970s, and within the hooped structures he has cultivated one of the state’s largest orchid collections.
Thompson’s expertise caught the attention of officials at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida. Thompson said that in 2001, he was helping the gardens on a project when staff asked how they could repay him.
“I said, ‘I want a piece of this,’” Thompson said, referring to the garden’s titan arum. “They sent me a little piece of it, which was about maybe a little bigger than a silver dollar, and so we raised it up from there.
“Why I wanted one (at the time) I don't know,” he said. ”But I can see now why I did.”
It took 13 years for Thompson and greenhouse associate director Bryon Rinke to nurture the plant to its first bloom. A second bloom followed in 2020, and along the way, the plant split in three. One of the plants made its way to a collector in North Carolina, while the other joined the college’s collection.
Thompson and Rinke talk about the titan arums a bit like some people talk about cats and dogs — they’ve hit their limit at two and don’t need another plant to feed.
“We don’t have room,” Thompson said. “They just get too big.”
“The one that’s in there now, we had to transplant it last year because it got so big it busted the side out of the other pot,” he said.
Thompson said the corms of both plants now weigh between 30 and 40 pounds each. That’s before they leaf, which Thompson said can be “just as spectacular” as the flower.
Earlier this month, one of the corms sent up a shoot. The shoot grew inches a day until it frilled, opening up into a cluster of flowers called an inflorescence. While the deep magenta of the flowers are showy, Thompson said it’s the flowers’ “sweet smell of death” that is part of the plant’s strategy for pollination.
The plant’s tall center, called a spadix, heats up, and flowers let off its signature smell of decay. Flies flock to the plant, thinking they’re headed for an easy meal. They leave disappointed, but hopefully carrying pollen to another corpse flower.
The display is known to leave an impression, Thompson said.
“Last time it bloomed, in 2020, we had a group of firemen come down and look at it from the fire station," he said. "One of them smelled it, walked out, and vomited. … He said he would not be coming (to look) at this one."
On Monday, some people hurried away from the greenhouse pinching their noses to avoid what was clearly a magic perfume for local flies. They were everywhere around the plant. Well-placed fans redirected the bugs and created a small breeze for onlookers like Judith Zaccariah.
Leaning back against the side of the greenhouse, Zaccariah took in the site of the flower. She said that after seeing two blooms in the past 15 years, she couldn’t believe she was witnessing a third spectacle in Winfield.
“'I’ve been here for more than 30 years,” Zaccariah said. “People still think, "What are you doing in Kansas?” I love to tell them about something like this because it's weird — because I had to come to Kansas to see something like this.”
