Why the corpse flower seems like it’s always blooming

Good morning, it’s Tuesday, July 14, and a heat advisory continues to be in effect. Drink lots of water!

There is currently a big commotion at the Huntington Gardens in San Marino. Here is a relevant text I received from a friend last week:

"TWO blooms and they still are perpetuating this 'sooo rare' narrative? Something's fishy about it, I tell you! On TOP of the flower stench."

She was referring, of course, to the famously foul-smelling Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the "corpse flower," which has become a sort of de-facto mascot for the Gardens. 

The giant phallic flower, which is native to the rainforests of Sumatra in Indonesia, stands between 6 and 12 feet tall and blooms but once every four to six years. Thanks to deforestation and poaching, it is estimated that there may only be about 500 left in the wild. 

At the Huntington, which acquired a corpse flower in 1999, the rare bloom always leads to a flurry of media coverage — and a huge jump in attendance at the gardens. (Two bloomed this year, and during three visits over the past week, the Huntington was abuzz. The gift shop offered a corpse flower enamel pin set. The coffee shop sold limited-edition sugar cookies printed with a corpse flower for $8 apiece. I saw a patron wearing a vintage corpse flower T-shirt.)

Annabel Adams, the Huntington’s vice president of communications, told me it's consistently their biggest draw, bringing in crowds double or triple the average turnout, with visitors willing to wait in long lines to catch a whiff of this rare occurrence.

But how rare is it really? 

Brandon Tam, the Huntington’s associate curator for the Orchid Collection, filled me in on the history of the corpse flower at the Huntington. Back in 1999, more than 75,000 people went to see the first bloom. According to the L.A. Times, so many people swarmed the front gates (“like dung beetles in the jungle”) that the institution was forced to close its doors early. Two patrons fainted in the hours-long line, and staff had to stop counting how many people came in, because everyone had to focus on crowd control.  

And then … years went by. “There were many years that we didn't have a bloom," Tam said. "I believe [there was a bloom in] 2002, then 2009 ... then '12, then '14."

But starting in 2018, the Huntington has seen at least one bloom each year, and sometimes more. How is that possible given that the flower only blooms "every four to six years"?

The answer is actually rather simple: The Huntington has more than 40 corpse flowers in its collection. (Botanists mated their first specimen from 1999 with another corpse flower held in a botanical garden in Santa Barbara, and made thousands of baby plants.) Every summer — the season when the flower blooms — staff wheel out the specimen (or specimens) ready to inch open and release their stench.

"In 2018, we actually had four blooms in a single year," Tam said. "Statistically speaking, we should have more than a single bloom each year."

On Sunday, I headed to the Huntington Gardens when the first of the two corpse flowers to bloom this year began opening up. Within two hours, a line of over 80 people snaked around the garden's conservatory to see "Odorysseus" (the name was chosen through a call-out on social media, timed to the release of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey).

Monday morning, I visited again after checking the garden's livestream and seeing that "Odora" — a less-obvious pun on Sleeping Beauty's Aurora — was also open. Volunteer Desiree Paiz told me that Odora had actually bloomed just two years earlier. "She's on her own path," Paiz said. 

Both times, I stood at the exit asking for people's reactions to the stench, which to me vaguely evoked a still-damp sock that had rested for some hours in the dryer. Paiz told me it smelled to her like "a dead lizard or a dead rat." Peter Husking from Altadena told me it smelled like fish he'd left in his garbage for a couple of hours.

One attendee, Sofia Farid, offered a comment that was echoed by others: "I didn't really smell anything."

NIPPED IN THE BUD? Twelve states, including California, have sued to block Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. "Audiences on every sofa and in every movie theater seat would feel the impact of this unlawful merger," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

GAMBLING TAKES ROOT: LAist reports that therapists are seeing an increasing number of young patients with gambling addiction, which they blame on the rise of prediction markets like Kalshi.

HOSE TURNED BACK ON: President Donald Trump has ordered the reopening of an oil pipeline off the coast of Santa Barbara that was dormant for 11 years. The New York Times details how Santa Barbarans are reacting.

LAW FIRM PLANTS A COWBOY: The L.A. Times's Rebecca Ellis unspools a wild and curious account of an actor who says he was hired by a Los Angeles law firm to play a cowboy and recruit Val Verde locals to join a lawsuit against a nearby landfill.

WEEDING OUT BAD TICKETS: My colleague Tomo Chien reported on how LADOT issued nearly $1 million in bogus street sweeping tickets. He also developed a tool that lets you check whether the street sweeping ticket you received is valid.

NEW FIELDS: L.A. Material's Julia Wick broke the story that Yusef Robb, an informal advisor to Mayor Karen Bass, took a job last month advising Lineage, the cold storage company whose Boyle Heights facility burned for more than a week. He later announced he would halt his unpaid work for the mayor.

A Sprawling Los Feliz Grande Dame With Lots of Color

This five-bedroom, six-bath manse just north of Los Feliz Boulevard is not for those wary of vibrant touches. There’s a hand-painted abstract mural in the dining room, a lilac kitchen, a jewel-toned media room and peach-painted bookcases. The styling looks engineered to be featured in Architectural Digest, which — per the listing — has happened, though no link is provided. 

The lush backyard looks potentially small for the price tag, though there could be more space than can be seen in the photos. There is also a guesthouse “currently used as a studio for a luxury collection of handmade vintage Moroccan rugs,” as one does. 

The 5,618 square-foot property is listed for $6.5 million.

AND FINALLY… A poem to pair with your morning coffee: “The Flower that smiles to-day” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

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