Amorphophallus titanum
Contents
The Titan Arum in Bonn 2000
The titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) flowered from 6th July to 9th July at the botanic garden in Bonn. From the beginning of June until it started flowering, the bud had grown to the appreciable size of 2.57 m in the space of only 5 weeks - a record for the botanic garden. On a worldwide scale, this made it the third largest plant to have flowered in botanic gardens to date. The largest plant to have flowered in a botanic garden before this date was a plant in Wageningen (The Netherlands) in 1932 at 2.67 m. Its inflorescence, which had grown from a tuber weighing 36 kg, started opening on Thursday at around 1 pm, and had reached its full size by midnight.
The largest titan arum inflorescences
- 1. Bonn (Germany), May 2003, 274 cm
- 2. Wageningen (The Netherlands), 1932, 267 cm
- 3. Bogor (Indonesia), 261 cm
- 4. Bonn (Germany), 2000, 257,5 cm
- 5. New York (USA), 1937, 256,5 cm
- * Frankfurt (Germany), 1985, circa 250 cm
(* In contrast to the other flowerings, the Frankfurt plant was measured from the tuber upward (2.7m). For comparison with other plants, therefore, about 20 cm have to be deducted.)
During the first night, it developed a very intensive smell. On Friday afternoon, it had already closed up again quite far, and then stayed unchanged until Sunday night. In the following night, the central column, the Osmophore, then collapsed.
This was already the seventh time since 1937 that Amorphophallus titanum came to flowering in the botanic garden in Bonn.
Diagrams: Total length and height gain
Visitor interest
Like on the previous occasions that the titan arum flowered at the botanic garden in Bonn, visitors flocked to see the plant. Despite the bad weather, from Thursday evening to Sunday, more than 14,000 visitors came to see the titan arum. A web page especially implemented for Amorphophallus registered 2,878 hits in the same period.
