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Who: Photographer Peter Murphy

Where: Botanic Gardens, Sydney, Australia

When: October 7, 2004

What: World’s Largest Flower – the Titan Arum

This was the first flowering at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney of the world’s biggest flower, which originates in the rain forests of Sumatra. The flower peaked October 7 – 8, 2004 and attracted huge crowds.

The sight of one of these flowers in bloom is extremely rare. Considered the ‘holy grail’ of botany, it is also known as the “Corpse Flower” because of the nasty stench given off by the blooms during night flowering; the plant gets so hot it steams, releasing foul-smelling chemicals to attract pollinators – namely carrion and dung beetles. Alistair Hay, director of the Botanical Gardens Trust, described the odor “like overripe Camembert cheese on a bed or roadkill”.

The plant can tower to a height of six feet or more and opens to a diameter of three to four feet. The flower may bloom only two or three times during its 40-year lifespan. (There have been less than 20 recorded blooms of this flower in the United States.)

How: “This was an extremely contrasty setting -- so I autobracketed 2 stops. Because wasn’t using a tripod it was necessary to calibrate each exposure pair first -- to each other -- and then, after aligning them I composited them with Photomatix (as partial equirectangular images) and then stitched the resultant images into the final panorama”, Peter Murphy writes.
Email:pmurphy4[at]bigpond[dot]net[dot]au