This spring’s most anticipated bloom isn’t in the garden beds across campus. It’s unfolding in the Life Sciences Greenhouse where Morphy, Dartmouth’s 23-year old titan arum, has bloomed, offering visitors a rare chance to see one of the largest and most unusual flowering events in the plant world.
A ruffled petal-like layer, pale-green on the outside and a deep red on the inside, unfurls like a giant cup around a towering central stalk that can grow up to 12-feet tall and hides a cluster of small flowers.
Still more striking than its appearance is the bloom’s famously pungent odor that inspires the nickname, corpse flower, and has already pervaded the halls of the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center.
The stench, often reminiscent of rotting flesh, attracts pollinators like flies and beetles that feed on carrion. The odor arises from a cocktail of sulphur-based compounds that the plant has evolved to produce. To ensure that the fetid smell travels far, the titan arum also turns up the heat in the flower’s tall, central stalk by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit using energy from starch stored in its large underground stem.
“This bloom is the most offensive smelling of the 13 corpse flower blooms I have witnessed in my career as a botanical horticulturist,” says Assistant Greenhouse Manager Dana Ozimek. “I wasn’t the only one to think that, as we had more flies come to this bloom than we have ever observed here at Dartmouth. It helped make it easier to imagine the insect activity that would be swarming the bloom in the wilds of Sumatra.”
A 2024 study led by G. Eric Schaller, professor of biological sciences, helped uncover the genetic pathways and biological processes that drive both heat production and odor release during corpse flower blooms and revealed a new and significant ingredient of titan arum’s pungent scent—an organic compound known as putrescine, an odorant found in dead animals when they begin to rot.
The current flowering event is another opportunity for Schaller and his students to gather temperature data, bottle up the odiferous chemicals, and collect tissue samples for genetic analysis. Their experiments will allow them to study whether and how Morphy’s bloom might influence other corpse flowers in the greenhouse.
Several undergraduates in the Department of Biological Sciences are also doing projects on the bloom, including Eggleston Plant Science Fellow Aurora Wackford ’26, who will be combining recorded climate data and the greenhouse staff’s observations of Morphy to help understand the environmental mechanisms behind the corpse flower’s behavior.
Several years can pass between flowering events, which are very short-lived—they only last a day or two. Morphy last bloomed in March 2024.
“Every bloom is spectacular, and it is always fascinating to observe the similarities and differences between different inflorescences,” says Ozimek. “It is a delight to observe the range of reactions people have as they witness such a dramatic example of the wonders of the plant world.”
The greenhouse will be open to the public to see and smell Morphy through Wednesday, May 13.
