By Aani Nagaiah, Correspondent
Every morning around 9, before the crowds arrive at The Huntington, Brandon Tam and Erik de Leon walk into the Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory carrying a measuring tape.
Their patients are two corpse flowers, towering plants that can stretch three or four inches taller in a single day as they race toward one of the rarest spectacles in the plant world, a bloom that lasts just 24 to 48 hours and smells, famously, like death.
“We look at the overall health of the plant, how quickly it’s grown overnight,” said Tam, associate curator of the orchid collection, who also oversees the Huntington’s corpse flowers. “We measure the growth day over day.”
The San Marino institution announced last week that two of its Titan Arums are expected to bloom in the coming days. One, nicknamed Odora, last flowered in 2024. The other is making its public debut, and the Huntington is letting the public vote on its name through Instagram. Viewing began July 2 during regular hours, with a livestream running around the clock at huntington.org/corpse-flower.
Behind every bloom is a small team that has spent years, not days, coaxing the endangered giants along. And for both caretakers, the work is personal.
- Also see: Double stink — Not one but two corpse flowers set to bloom at Huntington — watch them live
De Leon still remembers his first corpse flower. He was a teen volunteer when a special evening viewing was announced, and he drove an hour and a half to see it.
“It felt very much like a pilgrimage almost,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that I was gonna see it, and now it’s so surreal that I get to grow it.”
Tam’s first encounter came in 2009, when he was also high school volunteer at the Huntington. Back then, blooms arrived only every three or four years. He has been an employee for 16 years, and thanks to the garden’s conservation program, multiple flowers now open every year.
The Huntington keeps 43 mature specimens behind the scenes, each tracked by an accession number that Tam compares to a Social Security number. To their caretakers, the plants are anything but interchangeable.
“They’re just like humans,” Tam said. “We’re amongst the same species, but we all have very unique characteristics.”
The team knows a bloom is imminent when the daily measurements spike and then level off. Then comes the other signal.
“It’s kind of akin to hot garbage, more rotting meat, like a dumpster on a hot day,” de Leon said of the odor. “It’s a cocktail of very foul odors, but it grows on you.”
Tam said the stench follows him home on bloom nights, clinging to his clothes. But to both men, the smell is a recruiting tool. Fewer than 300 of the plants are believed to remain in the wild in Sumatra, and the corpse flower’s fame, they say, is a rare chance to make people care about species that will never draw a crowd.
“It’s like the panda of the plant world,” Tam said. “The corpse flower is, of course, not adorable. It’s not cute. It’s weird. It’s funky. It smells. It’s large. It’s very odd. But that still attracts people.”
Pandas were pulled back from the brink because their charisma rallied the public, Tam said, and the corpse flower can do the same work for the plant kingdom. There are “literally thousands and thousands of other species that need the same level of conservation work,” he said, “but unfortunately, they don’t really fall on the radar of other people because they’re just not as odd.”
The Huntington has backed that message with action. After its flower bloomed in 2002, staff shared pollen with UC Santa Barbara, producing hundreds of seeds distributed to botanical gardens nationwide. Many corpse flowers blooming in the United States today descend from that pairing, and the garden sells seedlings through its International Succulent Introductions program, which Tam said reduces the incentive to poach wild plants.
- Also see: (from the archive) ‘Green Boy,’ the corpse flower at The Huntington, is finally blooming
Since 1999, the Huntington has exhibited 29 corpse flower blooms, more than any other institution in the Western United States. Visitors who came as children in 1999 now bring kids of their own, Tam said, many walking in with fingers already pinching their noses.
For the caretakers, the hope is that they leave with more than a photo.
“I would like to imagine that people walk away with more of that sense of wonder and curiosity,” de Leon said. “This is just one out of the millions that there are out there.”
The best time to catch the bloom is early morning. Updates will be posted to the Huntington’s Instagram, @thehuntingtonlibrary.
Aani Nagaiah is a correspondent with the Southern California News Group.