The corpse flower growing inside the Temple Ambler Greenhouse and Research Complex bloomed for the first time since 2021, giving off a powerful stench and attracting hundreds of visitors.
Little Stinker bloomed for the first time since 2021, filling the Ambler Greenhouse and Research Complex with its infamous stench.
Photo by Ava B. Mendelsohn
Around 1 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, a foul stench of rotting meat wafted across Temple’s Ambler Campus and intensified into the evening. The smell emanated from Little Stinker, an aptly named corpse flower blooming inside the Temple Ambler Greenhouse and Research Complex.
In the nearly two days that followed, more than 500 visitors packed into the greenhouse for the chance to see and smell Little Stinker, which stands just a bit over 4 feet tall.
It’s a rare and fleeting phenomenon—corpse flowers only bloom for about 24–36 hours, and it can be years before they bloom again.
Some visitors arrived at Ambler still in disbelief over just how stinky the flower can be.
“Our parking lot is down wind of the greenhouse, so we’ll get visitors walking up thinking there is roadkill somewhere along the road,” said Ben Snyder, TYL ’16, manager of the Tyler School of Art and Architecture’s Greenhouse Education and Research Complex at Ambler. “But no, that’s the flower they’re coming here to see.”
Snyder took over as manager in 2017, and the corpse flower, or Amorphophallus titanum, was one of the first plants he added to the greenhouse collection.
The corpse flower is notable for being the world’s largest unbranched inflorescence, a technical term meaning that it is not one single flower, but rather a bunch of small flowers clustered together on a giant stalk.
It is perhaps most famous for its putrid smell, which Snyder says is a mechanism for attracting pollinators, like flies and beetles. In the wild, Snyder says the smell can travel as far as a half mile, and for good reason. To produce seeds, corpse flowers need to be cross-pollinated with another corpse flower blooming at the same time.
“The likelihood of that actually happening is not that great, which is why it smells so strong,” said Snyder, a 2016 graduate of Tyler’s horticulture program. “That way, any pollinator within half a mile knows it’s there, and hopefully one of them will visit two plants and cross-pollinate.”
The plant is native to Indonesia’s western Sumatra rainforest, but Snyder acquired Temple’s first corpse flowers from Ohio State University in 2017. They remained dormant until the spring of 2021, when his patience was rewarded with back-to-back blooms, an extreme rarity.
Temple held a contest to name the two blooming flowers, and the people named them Big Stinker and Little Stinker. Big Stinker bloomed again in May of 2024, and this is Little Stinker’s second bloom.
“From a horticulture standpoint, this plant is special because it is an endangered species and under threat from habitat loss and climate change,” Snyder said.
Corpse flowers are also suffering from a genetic bottleneck. Because they have such a narrow geographical range and are now mostly grown in botanical gardens and greenhouses, Snyder explained that most corpse flowers are descendants of only a few wildly collected plants.
In 2021, Ambler’s greenhouse participated in a genetic study led by a researcher from the Chicago Botanic Garden to trace the lineage of corpse flowers and support conservation efforts.
“We now have a genetic tree and are able to trace our corpse flowers here at Temple Ambler back to their wild ancestors, which is pretty cool,” Snyder said.
Little Stinker’s bloom ended early Saturday morning, and its floral structure collapsed Saturday night. For the next four or five months, it will essentially be an empty pot of soil as the plant rests. During that time, Snyder and the greenhouse staff will remove it from its pot, clean its tuber—the underground stem from which the plant grows—and inspect the tuber for signs of rot.
They’ll then repot the plant in fresh soil, and, as they do for the nearly dozen other corpse flowers living in the greenhouse, they’ll keep Little Stinker happy with plenty of heat, humidity and fertilizer.
Then the wait begins for its next stinky bloom.
Learn more about Ambler’s corpse flower blooms and follow Temple Ambler on YouTube and Instagram for livestreams and updates related to its corpse flowers.