Rare Titan to flower in Ubud’s Botanic Garden

The new BOTANIC GARDEN UBUD proudly announces it’s success in growing several species of Titans - in Indonesian, "bunga bangkai" – (bunga means flower, while bangkai means corpse or cadaver) - or in scientific terms Amorphophallus titanium. One Titan Arum - from Sumatra - developed it’s big bloom which is to flowering only some days. Two others are close to inflorescene within days.

The Titan is considered as the biggest unbranched flower plant on the planet with flowers becoming as high as 2,70 m. Our flowers though are much smaller so far.

The "fragrance" of the inflorescence resembles rotting meat, attracting carrion-eating beetles and Flesh Flies (family Sarcophagidae) that pollinate it.

The titan arum only grows in the wild in the equatorial rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia. It was first discovered there in 1878 by Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari. The plant flowers only infrequently in the wild and even more rarely when cultivated. It first flowered in cultivation at the Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew in London, in 1889, with around 60 cultivated blossoms since then. The first documented flowerings in the U.S. were at New York Botanical Garden in 1937 and 1939. The number of cultivated plants has increased in recent years, and it is not uncommon for there to be five or more flowering events in gardens around the world in a single year.