Our Corpse Flower (Amorphophallus titanum) Wallpaper mask features “Stinky” in his Denver Botanic Garden habitat. A corpse flower in captivity takes 7-10 years to bloom the first time and is unpredictable thereafter. Thus, we felt quite privileged to join the long lines to smell the garbagy, putrefying smell in 2018. I wrote about that bitter-sweet-stinky experience in “Corpse Flower Revisited, Briefly in Bloom at the Denver Botanic Gardens.” Alabaster Rhumb took the photo of Stinky and designed our Corpse Flower …
Tag: Corpse flower
Digging into the Chemistry of the Creepy Smells of Blood, Death, and Darkness
When we think of scary, we ordinarily think of the sights–dark hallways and spider webs, bloody masks and crumbling gravestones, and to a lesser extent, sounds–creaking doors and spooky voices–cue Vincent Price’s Witchcraft Magic!–but what about creepy smells? So many write about the nostalgic scents, the comforting ones of kitchens and gardens, lime-flower tea and madeleines, but what about those creepy smells we prefer to avoid or forget–those of blood and the grave, caves and decay? What makes them provoke …
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Corpse Flower Revisited, Briefly in Bloom at the Denver Botanic Gardens 2018 * Essay * M. Leona Godin
The last few weeks have been intense and hard. My father passed away on August 19, the day after my birthday, and his services were held on my partner Alabaster’s birthday September 1. But my dad came into this world crashing a funeral–his father’s–and so the whole cycle of life seems contained in my dad’s own. Enter the corpse flower, and its day of bloom at the Denver Botanic Gardens on August 31, the morning of the day we were …
The Corpse Flower & Goethe, Dying Into Being
*This Distill My Heart about the infamous corpse flower and its unsavory pollinators is a little bit stinky creepy crawly, a little bit anthroposophical sweetness, and was first published at Quail Bell Magazine.* Most people know Goethe as the author of Faust and other literary works. But Goethe was also a keen amateur botanist who was very proud of his scientific writings, despite the fact that they fell flat in his own time–both because he was not a member of …