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The corpse flower isn’t doing much better in its native home of Sumatra, where its numbers are dwindling because of deforestation for lumber and crops. In 2018, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the plant as endangered. There are fewer than 1,000 individuals still in the wild.
— Read more in The Corpse Flower Is Not in the Mood: Saving the world’s stinkiest plant would be easier if it had any interest in reproducing at The Atlantic.
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Efforts to conserve the corpse flower are taking center stage in an initiative led by the Chicago Botanic Garden to increase rare plants’ odds of survival by maximizing their genetic diversity. The project will apply breeding principles used by zoos to conserve animal species to six plants that are perilously close to extinction, hopefully proving methods that could be applied to many other plants.
— Read more in How to Save Phallic Flowers From Being Inbred to Extinction at The New York Times (and see also, the older article Why Is the Corpse Flower So Stinky?).
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“Well, I’d say it smells like dirty gym socks wrapped around a rotten steak,” said Jonathan Goodrich, an associate director at the garden. “Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty descriptive.”
[...]“It releases the smell in waves,” Goodrich said. “It pulses, in a sense.”
— Maladora, a corpse flower at the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley, has bloomed. Read more at ‘Gym socks and rotten steak:’ Corpse flower blooms at UC garden at Berkeley News.
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Botanists across the US are trying to figure out why so many titan arums – better known as corpse flowers – are blooming simultaneously around the country this year.
This is super weird, because there have only been 157 recorded blooms ever between 1889 and 2008. But this year in the US alone, at least seven flowers have bloomed.
— Read more at America's pungent corpse flowers are all mysteriously blooming at once at ScienceAlert.
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Visitors to Adelaide Botanic Garden are asked what a corpse flower smells like, after visiting "Ganteng the Titan Arum". Ganteng (reportedly Indonesian for "handsome") bloomed in February. At the moment, you can also watch a live stream of "Sprout", a corpse flower just about to bloom at the Chicago Botanic Garden.