Friday Weird Sex Blogging - The Giant Stinkin' Phallus!

{First posted here]. Well, this Friday Weird Sex Blogging is not going to be so unique. After all, Janet and Zuzu have already blogged about it, but who can resist a phallic-looking, rotten-meat smelling, fly-attracting flower! And it is not a B-grade movie on the sci-fi channel. This is real! The Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum), in all its 3m tall glory is about to start stinking up the greenhouse at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (follow the flowering on the blog or watch the flowering web-cam here) :

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It's actually a whole inflorescence; the individual flowers actually aren't very big. The largest single flower is a Rafflesia, which also is a carrion flower, but the plant is a parasite. None the less the titan arum is a great thing to behold. I made the mistake of letting a smaller species flower in our house one winter. Smelled like someone had dragged a dead cow inside.