The Stinky, Meaty Flowers of Spring

—Taro Ietaka, Director of Conservation & Land Stewardship

A South African carrion flower (Orbea variegata). Photo by Larry Deack from Wikimedia.

Pollinator gardens have become increasingly popular thanks to the plight of the charismatic monarch butterfly and honeybee. However, there is a type of pollinator that most gardeners don't think about when planning their flowerbeds: flies. After all, who would want to attract those pesky, sometimes filthy, nuisances? Some flowers definitely do want them and have evolved to make themselves more appealing to flies.

To a fly, a meal of rotting meat is hard to pass up. In fact, they like carrion so much they even use it for nurseries: they lay their eggs on the decaying flesh so that their larvae have a food source. Through mutations over many generations, some flowers have chanced upon a successful formula: rather than making sweet nectar or fragrances to attract butterflies, bees, and birds, these flowers have the coloration of putrid meat and a smell to match.

In our area, two of the earliest spring wildflowers are meat-mimics. Skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) has a stinky, purple-green flower that can generate its own heat, perhaps to make its smell waft further. Stinking Benjamin (Trillium erectum) is a beautiful dark-red, three-petaled flower, but as its name implies, it is not one you'd want to use in a bouquet. As interesting as these flowers are, they can't rival the sheer size and stink power of a couple of Indonesian flowers: Rafflesia arnoldii and Amorphophallus titanum. These 'corpse flowers' are among the biggest in the world and have the smell to match.

Happy spring, and remember not to stop and smell any liver-colored flowers.