Chinese Garden Part Two: The Glorious Blooms
All around the Seattle Chinese Garden are beautiful flowers! I'm glad to live in a world where flowers exist. There could be an alien planet out there where flowers never evolved. How sad would that be! It's not even that implausible. Flowers didn't always exist. They came into existence 140 million years ago. Before the existence of our delicate, colorful, petaled friends the flower, mainly ferns and cone bearing trees existed. Then, evolution took a magical turn and flowers came into existence!
However, not all flower evolution took a dainty and whimsical turn. There is one flower that while we should all admire, we should be grateful that not all flowers turned out this way. The Titan Arum is a huge flower (up to 10 feet tall!) and it doesn't smell of sweet jasmines on a summer wind, or roses in the sunshine, it smells like dead people! The Titan Arum produces the rank and gruesome smell of a slowly rotting corpse. The rotting smell attracts insect pollinators, so even if it's gross, it's also a clever evolutionary technique for survival. The flower is only open for 48 hours, so those non-insects among us who don't get joy in the smell of death and decay are only subjected to the smell for a short while.
The flowers at the Seattle Chinese Garden were all beautiful and smelled just the way a flower should: wonderful!
However, not all flower evolution took a dainty and whimsical turn. There is one flower that while we should all admire, we should be grateful that not all flowers turned out this way. The Titan Arum is a huge flower (up to 10 feet tall!) and it doesn't smell of sweet jasmines on a summer wind, or roses in the sunshine, it smells like dead people! The Titan Arum produces the rank and gruesome smell of a slowly rotting corpse. The rotting smell attracts insect pollinators, so even if it's gross, it's also a clever evolutionary technique for survival. The flower is only open for 48 hours, so those non-insects among us who don't get joy in the smell of death and decay are only subjected to the smell for a short while.
The flowers at the Seattle Chinese Garden were all beautiful and smelled just the way a flower should: wonderful!