The Adelaide Botanic Gardens is being inundated with visitors with some reporting an hour-and-a-half wait to catch a glimpse — or rather a whiff, of a corpse flower that bloomed at the weekend.
The Titan Arum, more commonly known as the corpse flower due to its rotting flesh smell, usually takes 10 years to flower from seed and then only blooms every three-to-five years after that.
This flower, which has been growing at the gardens for about 10 years, started opening at 2pm yesterday and by 5pm, it had completely opened and begun to pump out its infamous smell.
The Adelaide Botanic Gardens has cultivated a number of corpse flowers — with some of those flowers blooming in 2016 and 2017.
Horticulturalist John Sandham said what made this flower unique was that it came from a cutting rather than a seed.
"What this flower is this time around is actually a 10-year-old plant that we produced from a leaf cutting," he said.
"It's actually unique, it's second generation, and we're very excited about that. This is the first flowering of the second generation."
Horticultural curator at the gardens Matt Coulter said the flower looked its best and smelt the strongest on the first day and would wither within about 48 hours.
He said about 1,500 people went through the gardens on Sunday night, which stayed open later to accommodate onlookers, and crowds had already gathered on Monday morning.
"It was amazing to be able to show the public what an amazing plant this is," he said.
"Some people commented last night it doesn't look real, it looks man-made, it's just so incredible.
"Other than the smell it is actually an incredibly beautiful plant."
For those wanting to catch a whiff of the strange smell, Monday was the final day to do so, Mr Coulter said.
He said the smell pulses from the flower, working much like an air freshener, and can smell stronger from a distance.
"It has this real dead rat sort of smell, but also [smells like] fermentation, rotten cheese. A lot of people think it smells like dead fish, it has real complex aromas — it's very fascinating," he said.
"If people want to smell it today is the day to come, by tomorrow the smell would have actually stopped, it only smells for two days.
"Tomorrow it'll still be looking okay, but it's on its decline, so basically it's a 24-to-48-hour period that it'll look its best."
