A Bit of a Stink at The Huntington

I’ve always thought I’ll someday meet a celebrity if I visit Los Angeles often enough; I just didn’t expect it would be a plant.

'Stinky' Amorphophallus titanum at the Huntington Botanical Gardens (Photo:Tim Jones)

Meet Amorphophallus titanum, or Titan Arum, or ‘Corpse Flower’, or simply ‘Big Stinky’ to it’s friends at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in Pasadena.

The deal with Stinky, one of the largest and smelliest flowers you’re ever likely meet, is that most of the time it keeps that outer petal-like spathe tightly closed around its central spadix.  Only on rare occasions, often with years between events, does the flower open up for a very short time, simultaneously attracting pollinating insects inside with a disgusting (to us) odour – hence ‘Corpse Flower’.

We’ve been following the plant’s progress on this Huntington blog, in a bid to time our visit to coincide with its opened, smelly, best.  As it turned out, having heard on Saturday it was blooming, we drove over today, Sunday, only to find it had closed up again; job done apparently: bad smells, insects, the lot.

Luckily, while I enjoy a bit of botany now and then, I’m not obsessive about it, so won’t be falling on my trowel any time soon.  But for some, I get the feeling it’s like an astronomer missing an eclipse or a transit of Venus.

You can see the plant wasn’t totally closed up (see the Huntington website for the plant in bloom) and we did get a sniff of a collected sample of it’s insect-attractant discharge; not pleasant, but I wouldn’t like to comment on its corpseiness.

So, an interesting diversion all the same.  And a good job by the Huntington marketing team; I’m sure they give Stinky a big hug when no-one’s looking.

Moving on from smelly plants now.  This was the first time I’d visited the Huntington since the Dibner Hall of the History of Science was opened in late 2008.  The permanent exhibition, Beautiful Science, is wonderful, and you’ll find that doubly so if you like rare old books covering subjects ranging from astronomy to natural history to medicine and light.

Newton’s own copy of Optiks is here – how’d they get that?  And I liked the accurate reproductions of Galileo’s telescope that visitors can use to spy a simulated moon across the hall – moving their eye around to find the exit pupil like Galileo must have done; and Hooke’s microscope, with a genuine flea like the one Hooke so painstakingly drew in Micrographia.  There is even an original 18th century volume from Diderot’s Encyclopedie that the public can (carefully) leaf through.  Nice trusting touch.

All in all, the Huntington: comprising library, art collections, and botanical gardens, is well worth a visit. 

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