The rare corpse flower housed at Mount Holyoke College’s Talcott Greenhouse in South Hadley, Mass., bloomed overnight Monday, drawing visitors Tuesday who compared its notorious odor to rotting eggs, farm manure, and stinky diapers baking in the sun. The plant, nicknamed “Pangy” and known scientifically as Amorphophallus titanum, last bloomed at the college in 2023 and produces the foul smell only briefly and infrequently.
The bloom gave the college’s Botanic Garden a rare public opportunity to showcase the diversity of plant life and the extraordinary evolutionary adaptations species develop to survive — in this case, mimicking rotting flesh to attract fly and beetle pollinators.
SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. — Tom Clark, director and curator of the Mount Holyoke College Botanic Garden, arrived at the Talcott Greenhouse on Tuesday morning and knew immediately that Pangy had bloomed.
“Walking through the front door, we could smell it,” Clark said. “As we walked back to the greenhouse where it’s growing, the smell became stronger and stronger. It was just overwhelming — literally unbearable — to be back there with it. If you weren’t aware of this plant and walked into the greenhouse, you’d say, ‘What died in here?’”
The plant in question was the greenhouse’s corpse flower — Amorphophallus titanum, or titan arum — which opened overnight Monday and drew a steady line of visitors Tuesday eager to witness and smell one of the botanical world’s more extraordinary spectacles. Visitors compared the odor to rotting eggs, compost, farm manure, sulfur, and, by one description, a stinky diaper left out in the sun.
“I was expecting it to smell bad, but it smelled genuinely like rotting flesh,” said Nyx DelPrado, a first-year student at Mount Holyoke who waited in line to see the plant. “Its name is accurate.”
A fleeting and purposeful stink
The corpse flower, native to the rainforests of Sumatra, blooms infrequently and for only a brief window. What appears to be a single towering bloom is in fact an enormous inflorescence — a cluster of many tiny flowers clustered at the base of a tall central column called the spadix, enclosed by a deep purple, velvety spathe. The inflorescence withers within days.
The smell, Clark said, is not incidental. It exists to attract specific pollinators.
“A few people who have come in since have described the smell as being unbearable, tangy, like a trash can — it’s overwhelming,” Clark said. “But that odor is there for a purpose. It’s there to attract pollinators, flies in particular.”
The plant, nicknamed Pangy, had been growing rapidly for about six weeks before blooming, at times extending several inches in a single day. It first bloomed at Mount Holyoke in 2023. Because corpse flowers cannot pollinate themselves, seeds form only when pollen from another titan arum is available.
By midday Tuesday, greenhouse vents had been opened and the odor had begun to dissipate, offering arriving visitors a less intense experience.
Visitors from near and far
For some, the bloom was the culmination of years of waiting. Michael Breton drove two hours and took a vacation day from work to see it, saying he had been monitoring news alerts about corpse flower blooms for years.
“If you see a news article, and it’s from two days ago, it’s gone, so you gotta run quick,” Breton said. He compared the scent to “a stinky diaper that’s been left out in the sun” but described the plant itself as “bright, beautiful and colorful. It’s a lovely plant.”
Not every visitor found the smell as punishing as anticipated. Student Bryn Wickere described the bloom as “magnificent” and said the odor required proximity to register fully.
“I was actually expecting the smell to fill up the whole room, but it was more when you got up close and personal with her,” Wickere said.
For others, the experience triggered specific sensory memories. Student Maheen Siddiqi said she had expected the worst but landed on a more specific comparison.
“I didn’t know what the name meant. I thought it would smell like a corpse, but I don’t know what a corpse smells like,” Siddiqi said. “And I smelled it and it smelled like really bad eggs or sulfur or something.”
Senior Caroline Murray, who grew up in Vermont, said the smell was familiar. “I would say it smells kind of like a compost pile, a little bit like a working farm,” she said. “I’m from Vermont, so I’m very used to the smell of the farm and manure.”
A plant museum’s moment
Clark said the bloom serves a broader educational purpose for the Talcott Greenhouse, which he described as a “plant museum” housing about 2,000 species — a small fraction of the estimated 350,000 to 400,000 plant species worldwide. The event, he said, gives the public a rare chance to appreciate the diversity of plant life and the adaptations species develop to survive.
For Namuuna Negi, a Mount Holyoke junior, the appeal was inseparable from the bloom’s brevity.
“The impermanence of it, I think. People like to be in on what’s happening,” Negi said. “If they hear something’s going to die soon, they want to go see it before that happens so they can talk about it later.”