Rare corpse flower blooms in region

A rare corpse flower, Amorphophallus Titanum, famed for its size and distinctive smell, has bloomed in a private garden in the Bundaberg Region.

Native to the tropical rainforests of Indonesia, the corpse flower is seldom grown outside of Botanical Gardens.

Rare plant lover, and Bundaberg Regional Council Parks team member, Caleb Bird has waited years for his plant to produce its dramatic flower.

“I’m very excited to see it flower,” Caleb said.

“This being the first flowering, this is the first time I’ve seen one.

“I’ve been very tempted to fly to Botanic Gardens around the place to see one flower, but I’ve got one to flower in my backyard.”

Caleb said the plant took about 10 years in total to produce its first flower.

“It’s not full size, the flower can get bigger than that and they can get up to three metres in height by about a metre and a half across,” he said.

“The flower will last 24 to 36 hours and then it will start to breakdown.

“It closes back up and then slowly falls apart, and it’ll detach itself from the bulb down below.

“And then it will flower every, some say two to three years, some say every five to seven years, it depends on the plant, they’re very temperamental.”

Caleb has around 40 different species of Amorphophallus in his collection, and he acquired the Titanum bulb around eight years ago.

“It is the world’s largest inflorescence meaning it produces flowers down inside, there’s multiple flowers down in the bottom.

“It creates the corpse smell to be pollinated by flies.

“It attracts flies to be pollinated because this plant would have evolved before bees were a thing.

“This is out of its climate zone because it’s very tropical, but we’re able to grow them out of a tropical zone because they go dormant during the winter.”

After the flower dies down, Caleb said the plant then puts its energy into growing foliage and increasing in size.

“They produce the flower first and then the flower will die down and then it will produce a leaf after that,” he said.

“This one will probably produce a leaf that’s maybe three metres, three and a half metres high.

“When they’re a full size mature plant, they can produce a leaf that’s up to seven metres high with a trunk about the size of a power pole and they do that in six to eight weeks.”

Caleb said his interest in plants developed early on, inspired by his grandmother and his parents who ran a nursery in the 1990s.

“I enjoy the challenge of growing different things and I always search for stuff that’s different, that not everyone grows.

“They say you got a collector’s gene and people collect different things; I just collect plants.”