Driving to the Most Dangerous City in America at Midnight to Smell a Corpse
A corpse flower, that is. For those not in the know, the corpse flower is the world's largest flower. It is also one of the world's rarest flowers: internet conjecture has it that nary a thousand exist on the whole planet.
They only bloom once every decade, only at night, and only for ~24 hours. And only during the first few hours of their bloom cycle do they emit an (allegedly) putrid scent. It is (allegedly) to be reminiscent of rotting corpse, dead meat, and rotting trash.
So what does the internet's favorite flower REALLY smell like?
Short Answer: It's.....fine? Almost totally innocuous to me. It is not a floral odor, it is distinctly humid and cabbage-like. I would say slight nuances of "trash" underly the vegetation odor, but it's not bad.
To be clear, I'm not saying it smells good! A corpse flower perfume will NOT be appearing on this website. But as a "plant" odor, it's pretty generic!
Powerful, yes, you can smell its odor from 10 feet away. But if you encountered it in the wild I do not think it would be particularly outstanding in the setting of a jungle. It would absolutely blend right in to its surroundings. Personally, it's only about as displeasing as a bradford pear is to me.
Here is a reference chart:
As you can see, Tanoko perfume ranks as very pleasant, and cauliflower ranks as repulsive. A very smart person must have made this infographic!
Very Long Answer: I have wanted to smell a corpse flower ever since I found out they existed. As a perfumer and a narcissist, I feel I am uniquely qualified to judge the odor.
I have a suspicion that they do not smell as bad as they are made out to be, and perhaps even have some nice redeeming quality to them! The idea of it being corpse-y sounds appealing to me in the way that animalic notes are appealing in certain perfumes.
I had been watching the internet for one near me for weeks, and incidentally stumbled across one at the St Louis Botanical Gardens....that I decided not to visit. Of course my extreme FOMO made me regret not going.
Incidentally I was talking to my neighbor who happened to be heading to St Louis that same week. While there, she spoke to one of the horticulturists at the botanical gardens who told her that another, much bigger corpse flower was about to enter its bloom cycle.
Deciding I, along with my neighbor, would absolutely visit this particular corpse flower, I began stalking the botanical garden's facebook page. Every day (literally, every day) for 3 weeks I checked for any post about the flower. Eventually they posted a livestream, which I began checking multiple times a day (again, literally, I had alarms set for morning and evening to check the flower livestream)
Some weeks later....
It's Saturday morning, I wake up at 4:45am and decide to do a brick workout. As I haven't gone biking in sometime, this made me very tired. So tired that I was struggling to stay standing after I got done.
After a light breakfast I decide to go on a manic cleaning binge until 6pm. My feet hurt (poor shoe choice and concrete floors), my legs are weak, and now I'm just sitting on a chair trying to gather the energy to organize the shelf in front of me.
At this point I realize I've eaten nothing since breakfast (no wonder I'm tired) and decide I should probably cook some dinner. Oh but wait I better check the corpse flower's status, even though I literally just checked it only 2 hours ago.
And there it was, the post. St Louis Botanical Garden: "Special late night showing between 9pm and Midnight, last entry at 11:30pm"
I'm 4 hours away from St Louis. It is 6:30pm. Last entry at 11:30, leaving me a crisp hour to spare.
My neighbor who promised to come with immediately bailed. "I've got a life" she says, to the crazy person prepping their car to drive 350 miles to sniff a plant.
So I call my sister, microwave some mac and cheese, frantically pack my things, and head to pick her up. Between the two of us and our luggage packing habits we didn't get underway to St Louis until 7:48pm.
Clearly! That is a time crunch!! Google tells me STL is still 3 hours and 10 minutes away at 8:00pm, but we arrived at 10:30pm nonetheless. I'll let you do the math on that one ;)
Anyway, after our moderately paced drive where we obeyed all traffic laws, we were greeted with quite a surprise! For some reason, I assumed this was a small, private event for only the most dedicated plant freaks.
Who is staying out til midnight to look at some smelly plant? Well apparently...........2600 people. TWO THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED PEOPLE. I drew you a nice diagram of the line, which was almost half a mile!
We got in line at 10:30pm and finally saw the flower at...........3:34am
Would you wait 5 hours to smell a corpse flower? Apparently I would.
Unfortunately, I had decided to wear a suit and a notoriously uncomfortable brand of shoes with absolutely zero padding. My sister had also had a blazer on but had the foresight to bring a pair of sneakers and dress to change into. We were not the only people that had dressed for the occasion, but by the 2am mark we were certainly the only ones left.
Rewind a bit, after standing in this line for about 5 minutes, my sister once again had the foresight to realize we would not make it to our hotel in time to check in. She stayed to hold our place and that left me alone to make it to the hotel and back in line before the 11:30 cut off.
This would not have been a problem but I missed a turn on my navigation. Let me tell you, you do NOT want to be lost in inner-city St Louis at 11pm. I did make it to our hotel in time for check in, which we had booked sight unseen while on the road.
Little aside here, don't stay at the Hilton in St Louis. For $250 a night we got unfriendly staff, moldy tile, and a shower with a popcorn ceiling falling down into it.
I made it back to the line with about 5 minutes to spare before the 11:30 cut off. It was very fortunate we decided to wear warm clothes to an outdoor event in the middle of summer, because after midnight it became freezing cold. We waited, having no concept of how long the line was.
30 minutes would go by, an hour. Each hour we wondered, how long is the line? Where does it lead? Where is this flower? This will sound silly but this line was a serious willpower test.
For the first hour we were friendly and chatty with our line neighbors. We met a pharmaceutical researcher from Iowa and a microchip designer from Texas! After a while everyone was just silent. No expression, no talking, just intense waiting.
I was wearing a freshly dry-cleaned suit and shoes with no padding. Very few places to sit. My phone had died before we even arrived, nothing to do. The garden is dark, there was nothing to see. I could've sat on the ground technically but I'm not one to ruin good dry cleaning. By the 5th hour, everyone in line had this same hunched over sit/standing in place kind of posture. Many people had simply given up and gone home by that point. We were one of the last people in line. You cannot put across in writing how badly your feet and back will hurt standing in place for 5 hours, you really can't.
As we approached within a 20 foot radius of the flower you could start to smell it. My sister was the first to point out, it smells exactly like boiling cabbage. Our line neighbors all agreed, it's not that bad.
And after all that, at 3:34am we arrived. And for 45 glorious seconds we saw the corpse flower.
Yes, 45 seconds. This is why the line took so long and moved so slowly. It was the sheer number of people. We took about 1-2 steps every minute. That's because each of the 2600 people was only spending 30-60 seconds with the flower. Thank you to the volunteers who also stayed with us the whole time, the botanical gardens did not pay them.
Again to recap, we drove 4 hours to the most dangerous city in America to wait in line for another 5 hours to smell a corpse. Which actually turned out to just be an 8 foot tall cabbage flower.
P.S. Several weeks later I was talking to a friend of mine and noticed he was wearing a corpse flower shirt! I asked how he got that and he said he was there! That same day! And I was like "oh boy how bad was the line for you to get free merch?"
He said there was no line. He was just incidentally there during their regular business hours, when the once a decade plant happened to bloom, and he happened to walk by and get a free T-shirt. What gives.