Exotic Beauty (50) : Titan Arum

Exotic Beauty (50) : Titan Arum

The past years I made several visits to the conservatories of the National Botanic Garden of Belgium where 10.000 (!) plant and tree species originating from the tropics and the subtropics are growing in the greenhouses over there.

Thanks to the warm and moist climate in the conservatories and the intensive maintenance, it’s really amazing what an immense great variety of exotic flowers from all over the world can be seen there, even in the cold winter season !
Flowers whose natural habitat is situated in the rainforest, the mountain forest, isolated islands, deserts, etc……. Places that most of us will never or seldom visit.
Some of the flowers are very rare, extremely colourful or specially shaped.
Others were introduced in Europe by men and became a cultivated species or an ornamental houseplant.

I selected the –to my personal taste- most beautiful flowers that I saw there and made a series of them.

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In English also known as Corpse flower
Dutch name : Reuzenaronskelk
German name : Titanenwurz
Latin name : Amorphophallus titanum

Country of origin : rainforest of Sumatra, Indonesia

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Not really an exotic beauty, I fully agree, but very special this one : it’s the BIGGEST flower in the world that can reach 3 metres in height !
(the specimen that I shot was 2,32 meter high)

A Titan Arum coming into flower is as rare as it is spectacular.
The plant’s blooming schedule is completely unpredictable. It usually takes 6 years (or more) for it to accumulate sufficient energy to summon the power to blast up a bloom.
The flower itself smells like rotting flesh of a decomposing mammal.

In the wild, this striking plant is on the brink of extinction !
The tropical rainforest of Sumatra is the only place in the world where this plant grows and there 70% of its habitat has already been destroyed due to relentless and unstoppable logging.