So this is very cool. It's called Titan Arum...this one is named "Ted the Titan", and it only blooms once every two years for 48hrs. It started blooming today at the UC Davis greenhouse! When it blooms it gives off a smell like rotting meat. The smell wasn't as strong as I was expecting but it did sort of waft out a scent like the garbage needed to go out a day or two ago. It turns out this scent helps it attract flies to pollinate it. Weird. Technically it's not a flower but an inflorescence...a huge leaf holding hundreds of tiny flowers. As for the photo itself, I wish the photo included the top and bottom of the flower. Also compositionally I wanted a photo with just the bloom, but I realize that makes it harder to tell its size. You can see a little bit of someone's elbow poking in the right had side of the photo under the leaf, just to give and idea of the size. Here's a link to the greenhouse website if you're interested in reading more about Ted:
http://greenhouse.ucdavis.edu/conservatory/
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