The Titan Arum Experience...
Charleston Rotary Club presentation on July 29, 2008
The Titan Arum is commonly considered to be the largest flowering plant in the world. Though, technically, it's the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world because there are thousands of male and female flowers at the bottom of the inflorescence. The inflorescence is capable of reaching ten feet in height. The largest individual flower in the world is Rafflesia arnoldii which can reach up to three feet across.
Incidentally, 'Titan Arum' was a name created by Sir David Attenborough in 1993 while filming the BBC documentary The Private Life of Plants because he didn't think Amorphophallus titanum was an appropriate term for use on television.
As
I was taking pictures of the Titan Arum, somebody suggested that I
take a picture of the Titan Arum with a person standing next to it
for a size reference. Well, EIU President William Perry just
happened to walk in the greenhouse door to see the Titan Arum as we
were trying to find somebody to pose with the inflorescence. So,
here's our Titan Arum with Eastern Illinois University's President
William Perry for a size comparison. When President Perry first saw
the flower, he remarked, "It's a lot bigger than I thought it would
be."
So,
where do Titan Arums come from? The titan arum was discovered by
Italian Botanist Oroardo Beccari in Sumatra in 1878. It's indigenous
only to the Jambi Province. He brought some seeds back with him and
presented them to the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. The
titan arum first bloomed in cultivation at the Royal Botanic Gardens
in 1889. However, this was the Victorian era, and it is interesting
to note that young ladies were not allowed to view the flower
because of its phallic appearance.
The
Titan Arum has a life span of about 40 years. It spends most of its
life in a vegetative stage, sending up a single leaf at a time. The
single leaf can reach up to 20 feet tall and 15 feet wide. The
petiole can be as big as a person's thigh. Each leaf lasts about a
year followed by tuber dormancy of about 6-9 months. The tuber can
eventually weigh 200 pounds. It continues a vegetative cycle until
the tuber builds up enough energy to produce an inflorescence. It
usually takes about five to seven years for it to produce its first
inflorescence. If the flowers are not pollinated, the inflorescence
collapses and the tuber goes dormant for 6-9 months. The plant then
continues the vegetative cycle. (Image courtesy Mo Fayyaz,
University of Wisconsin - Madison)It may not flower again for two to ten years. However, one titan arum at the University of Connecticut recently had back to back blooms without an intervening leaf stage. Theirs bloomed around Mother's Day in 2007. The tuber went dormant for 13 months and then it sent up another inflorescence in July, 2008. Apparently their 92 pound tuber had enough energy to send up a second flower.
If the flowers are pollinated, the plant will send up an infructescence that will mature in about 6-12 months. The peduncle slowly rises to elevate the developing fruit above the ground. The fruit is orangish red and the size of cherries. Each fruit contains one to two seeds about the size of the end of my little finger. Birds eat the fruit and fly off with the seeds. However the fruit is poisonous to humans.
So, where did our titan arum come from? The history of our Titan Arum begins with the late Dr. James Symon. Dr. Symon was a very enthusiastic expert on Titan Arums and organized the expedition to Sumatra in 1993 to locate Titan Arums for Sir David Attenborough's BBC documentary "The Private Life of Plants." They found only one Titan Arum in fruit and brought back a number of seeds with them and distributed them to a number of universities, botanical gardens and arboretums around the world.
Seeds from this expedition ended up at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota Florida. It took eight years for their plants to produce their first flowers. In 2001, "Big Bucky" was pollinated by hand with pollen collected from "Mr. Magnificent." Later that year, the fruit from "Big Bucky" was offered to members of the university greenhouse forum I am a member of. One of the questions I wanted to answer when mine flowered was whether it would look more like its "mother" or its "father."
The
Titan Arum growing in the greenhouse is the one I obtained as a seed
from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2001 and planted in a
six-inch pot. It grew for almost eight years, sending up one leaf at
a time. Every year the leaf was literally twice as big as the
previous year. One foot, two feet, four feet, eight feet, sixteen
feet. This spring I thought it was going to put up a twenty-foot
leaf. But, surprise, surprise, it decided to flower. Our Titan Arum
bloomed for the first time on June 21, 2008.According to Mo Fayyaz at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, there have been only about 135 documented blooms by titan arums in cultivation worldwide. The first time one bloomed in the United States was at the New York Botanical Gardens in 1937. It took an additional sixty-two years to reach eleven blooms in the United States and the bloom in 1999 at California's Huntington Botanical Gardens attracted 75,000 visitors. When I first saw an image of the multitudes standing in line to see the Titan Arum at Huntington Botanical Gardens, I thought, Oh My God. What have I gotten myself into? After asking other universities about their recent experiences with Titan Arum blooms, I expected about 4,000 to 8,000 visitors. We ended up with around 3,000.
So let's head on into the greenhouse to look at our Titan Arum. I'll set the wayback machine to June, 2008.
After
posting the June 5th picture of the bud on my university greenhouse
forum, it was confirmed by experts that it was going to bloom.
However, I was nervous about announcing to the world that it was
going to flower. It wasn't until June 11 that I was convinced that
it was an inflorescence, (which is the flowering part of a plant),
and not a leaf. The inflorescence grew about four to five inches a
day, reaching a final height of five feet seven and a half inches by
the time it opened.
Looking at the inflorescence's anatomy, it has five bracts that cover and protect it during development. As development continues, they eventually fall away and die. The peduncle is a sturdy post that elevates the inflorescence above the ground. Our Titan Arum peduncle was 12.5 inches tall.
The
spadix is a tall, hollow French bread-like structure and comes in a
variety of colors ranging from yellow/green to red and maroon and
can reach ten feet tall. If we cut a hole in the side, we can see
that it is hollow, except for a little bit of gauze-like substance
inside. After it collapses, it feels a little like a rubber
chicken. It's purpose is to rise as high above the ground as
possible and release its famous odor of rotting meat. It also heats
up to approximately human body temperature.
So, why does it smell so bad? The spadix releases disulfides and trisulfides because it uses the odor of rotting meat to attract flies, carrion beetles and some species of bees in order to carry pollen from one plant to another.
The
odor begins shortly after the spathe starts to open up and is most
intense for about six hours before gradually diminishing. I can tell
you right now that it absolutely reeked in the greenhouse from about
3pm through 9pm on the day it opened. Standing next to it, the odor
would get up into the sinuses and would not go away. Many visitors
told me that they could smell the odor three blocks away and it
smelled like something had died in a dumpster nearby.
The
spadix heats up to about ten degrees warmer than the surrounding air
temperature to help volatilization chemicals. This is the titan arum
that bloomed in May 2007 at Gustavus Adolphus College. This is a
thermal image of the flower open all the way with humans in it for
comparison. The tip and base of the spadix glowed in the infrared.
(Images courtesy Brian O'Brien, Gustavus Adolphus College)
I
installed an infrared-capable security camera as a live webcam that
had it's own infrared source and was able to take pictures of our
inflorescence at night. Using the infrared light source, the plant
looked like it glowed in the dark in the infrared spectrum.
The spathe is a skirt-like structure that comes in a variety of colors ranging from red to maroon to enhance the appearance of dead meat. The spathe will gradually open up over several hours beginning in the afternoon, stay open all night, then it slowly close up the next day.
This series of images shows the spathe started to open a little after 1PM on Saturday and was fully open by 6PM. It was open all night and by 8AM the next morning, it started to close and had closed significantly by 2PM.
If you looked down inside the spathe when it was open you would see the female flowers. However, the best way to see the flowers is to cut a window in the side of the spathe. The male flowers are on top and female flowers are below.
A
close up of the female flowers shows fly eggs on the flowers. Every
one of these little white spots is an egg that a fly has laid on the
flower. If this plant had been in the tropical forest, the female
flowers would have been completely obscured by a thick coating of
fly eggs from thousands of flies. Unfortunately, the Titan Arum can not self-pollinate in nature. The female flowers are receptive to pollination for only one night and the male flowers don't start producing pollen until a day later. If you look closely at the male flowers in this picture, you can see the pollen extruding from them in long streamer-like filaments.
What about the show? Well, most of the time I spent worrying about what could go wrong.
Is
the inflorescence going to abort? Will some kid push it over?
Will a storm destroy the greenhouse and everything in it?
Will 50,000 people show up... or will nobody care?
I felt like a pregnant father waiting for his first child. This is a picture of the June 6th storm aftermath that toppled a tree next to the greenhouse.
And then it bloomed! I felt relieved and exhausted and rather pleased. These are pictures of it opening, in its full glory on Saturday night, and closing up Sunday afternoon.
Then
it slowly collapsed. The spadix began to lean over on June 26. It
fell over about 4:30 in the morning as I was watching it from home
on the live web cam. The inflorescence continued its collapse over
the next few days and by July 9 it had completely collapsed. By July
15 the peduncle had turned to mush so I gave the inflorescence a
proper burial in the compost pile.
What's
next? The tuber will remain dormant(*) until next spring and will
send up another leaf. I am hoping that it will bloom again in about
four years, but it could be anywhere from two to ten years before it
will bloom again. *August 10, 2008 update... Surprise, surprise! The tuber broke dormancy and started sending up a leaf bud. My how time flies :-). They just don't make time like they used to...
However,
I prefer to remember it as tall, stately, aromatic and gorgeous.
Several visitors asked me if I had given it a name. I told them that I was waiting for it to bloom and for the plant to tell me what it wanted to be called. Well, after all the visitors had gone late Saturday night and I was alone with the titan arum, we had a conversation. I'm certain that severe sleep deprivation, lack of food/water and powerful stress hormones surging through my brain had something to do with having a two-sided conversation with a plant at 2AM, but I can assure you that no drugs were involved. The flower told me her name. It is "The Velvet Queen"
I have a web site with a blog and images of the Titan Arum experience running beginning May 30, 2008. If you want to find out more about the event, go to Titan Arum 2008.
