For this roundup of Berry-Go-Round, we cast our spot-light on a shadowy corner of botanical curios that challenge our olfactory and aesthetic senses (and oftentimes, both) and test the limit of our love of plants.
After many months of snowy winter in the Northern hemisphere, one of the first Spring blooms Tracey encountered in the swamps was non other than the dark and brooding
skunk cabbage. Aaahh .... the smell of Spring. Over at the Pacific Coast Dana caught sight of its more cheerful but
equally odoriferous cousin. One thing about the Aroid family is that there's no shortage of smelly ugly plants, and the biggest of them all is a 2 metre tall foul spouting chimney -
Amorphophallus titanum - go see for yourself. Right over at Carnosa, Boon Leng has some collections of Amorphophalluses in the wild -
A. prainii is a particularly
stinky one. I have been a fan of these aroids for a while and sometime back, 4 species rewarded me with
blooms all at once. Admittedly, no mother will say her child is ugly, likewise a gardener, his plants. But has your child ever mimic a corpse with a hairy tail ? Well, Real Monstrosities featured a
dead horse arum that smelled like one too.
Out in the desert, Fireflyforest had a all-too-close encounter with the aptly named
stink gourd and came back wishing they had bought deodorant. More ungainly than ugly, I cannot stop grinning at this unorthodox
Saguaro specimen. At the other side of the world, somewhere in Nambib Desert to be precise,
Tarmo RTW has wonderful pictures of the ancient
Welwitschia mirabilis that sometimes had one wondering if its still alive - or had been alive. At the garden of
PATSP, another xerophyte,
Stapelia gigantea, unleashed its bristly bloom that smelled of dog faeces ....
Vines....how bad can they get ? Well I can assure you
Aristolochia gigantea is a real shocker and its smaller cousin
Pararistolochia promissa reeks of really bad seafood. Orchids too ? Yes - in fact this family is so diverse that its unsurprising some of them can be unconventional due to their extreme adaptations. Take the Bulbophyllums for example, this is a genus of many carrion-fly pollinated flowers and so they have to smell and look like the flies favourite haunt - rotting fruits or carcasses. Zul's Orchid craze featured one of these -
Bulbophyllum graveolens, and PBG Blog showcased the giant
Bulbophyllum beccarii from Borneo- from the smell, you would have thought somebody had died there. And what about the totally weird looking saprophytic orchid
Galeola , with its sausage-like pods and the fantastic underground orchid -
Rhizanthella gardneri ? Yes, I just said an underground orchid, though I am as baffled as you especially after
looking at the closeups.
And finally, let's look at some parasitic plants - this is where the experiments run wild on stolen rations. First off,
Hydnora - from
Real Monstrosities excellent photos I thought I was staring at an alien rupture. And from Jungle Mike's incredible adventures, the bizarre
Rafflesia and its hair-raisingly ugly cousin
Rhizanthes lowii.
Well, that sums it up for now - I fear some readers may have reached their threshold for smelly ugly things.
Cheers.
