Largest Flower Is It One Weighing 24 Pounds Or One With Height Of 10 Feet!

These two flowers battle for the nickname "corpse flower" in addition to the largest flower superlative.

Amorphophallus titanum

Bestowing a title for "largest flower" is not always as simple as measuring blooms.

Indeed, Amorphophallus titanum which has an inflorescence that can grow 10 feet in height, is not small by any definition.

The legendary Sir David Attenborough first used the name titan arum to refer to this magnificent tropical plant in the BBC series The Private Lives of Plants because he felt viewers might be offended by the plant’s Latin name, Amorphophallus titanum. Titan arum might have suited Attenborough’s viewers, but the plant still seduces people with one of the world’s largest and rarest flowering structures and and a reproduction method that beguiles insects with the illusion of decay in appearance, odor and even temperature; hence the name “Corpse Flower”.

The “Corpse Flower” is not actually a single flower but an inflorescence (a stalk of many flowers). The flowers are a mixture of tiny male and female flowers held out of sight at the base of the central phallus-like structure (spadix) surrounded by a pleated skirt-like covering (spathe) that is bright green on the outside and deep maroon inside when opened. The female flowers mature before the male (pollen producing) flowers which avoids self-pollination.

Ever since this plant was first discovered in Sumatra, Indonesia in 1878 by Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari, it has excited world-wide attention due to its massive size, fascinating appearance and habit of producing a foul odor resembling rotten flesh (to attract insects that pollinate it). During this process, the ‘flower-spadix’ actually heats up to human body temperature. UC Berkeley physicists experimented with an atomic magnetometer to measure possible biomagnetism of Trudy’s flower stalk on 2009. Further information on this topic can be found HERE.

The plant typically requires at least 7 years before it blooms but it may take even longer. In the normal life cycle, the plant produces one single enormous branched leaf at a time that looks like a small tree reaching 10-15 feet. The leaf will go completely dormant after about 16 months while its underground tuber ‘rests’ for awhile. When it next sprouts, it will produce either another single leaf or an enormous bloom.

The flower bud may take months to form but only remains open for a day or two before collapsing to restart the cycle. The characteristic ‘corpse’ odor is only produced for about a day before the collapse. If pollinated, the stalk grows into a large club-like head of orange-red seeds.

Rafflesia 

The flower with the world's largest bloom is the Rafflesia arnoldii. This rare flower is found in the rainforests of Indonesia. It can grow to be 3 feet across and weigh up to 24 pounds! It is a parasitic plant, with no visible leaves, roots, or stem.A plant with no leaves, no roots, no stem and the biggest flower in the world sounds like the stuff of comic books or science fiction.

'It is perhaps the largest and most magnificent flower in the world' was how Sir Stamford Raffles described his discovery in 1818 of Rafflesia arnoldii, modestly named after himself and his companion, surgeon-naturalist Dr James Arnold.

This jungle parasite of south-east Asia holds the all-time record-breaking bloom of 106.7 centimetres (3 ft 6 in) diameter and 11 kilograms (24 lb) weight, with petal-like lobes an inch thick.

It is one of the rarest plants in the world and on the verge of extinction.

As if size and rarity weren't enough, Rafflesia is also one of the world's most distasteful plants, designed to imitate rotting meat or dung.

The flower is basically a pot, flanked by five lurid red-brick and spotted cream 'petals,' advertising a warm welcome to carrion flies hungry for detritus. Yet the plant is now hanging on to a precarious existence in a few pockets of Sumatra, Borneo, Thailand and the Philippines, struggling to survive against marauding humans and its own infernal biology.

Everything seems stacked against Rafflesia. First, its seeds are difficult to germinate. Then it has gambled its life entirely on parasitising just one sort of vine. This is a dangerously cavalier approach to life, because without the vine it's dead.

Having gorged itself on the immoral earnings of parasitism for a few years, the plant eventually breaks out as a flower bud, swells up over several months, and then bursts into flower. But most of the flower buds die before opening, and even in bloom Rafflesia is fighting the clock. Because the flower only lasts a few days, it has to mate quickly with a nearby flower of the opposite sex. The trouble is, the male and female flowers are now so rare that it's a miracle to find a couple ready to cross-pollinate each other.