[Update, August 15, 2006: BBG requested permission to use some of these photos on their Web site! Check out their A. titanum Photo Gallery for August 14, 2006.]

“Baby” picture.

I doubt anyone’s been waiting breathlessly by their RSS or Atom feeds for my report. Last night, I had to crash early, and today was a picture-perfect day, so I got some gardening work done outside. Nevertheless, I apologize for my tardiness. In the meantime, I hope you’ve checked out the photos I took yesterday (technically, two calendar days ago, as it’s already past midnight Saturday night). I’ll highlight some of them here.

When I blogged Thursday night, after following the dramatic changes in the bloom on BBG’s Web Cam, I had hoped I would be able to get there as soon as they opened at 8am, on my way in to work. That didn’t work out, but I did get there Friday afternoon and spent over an hour there. Not only admiring the plant, but taking in the contact adrenaline of BBG staff and visitors. I also got to speak with both Alessandro Chiari and Mark Fisher, and I share my notes from those conversations here. Unless otherwise credited, the pictures in this blog entry are from that visit, and are also available in the flickr set I created from them.

One bit of business first: I did not get to smell the plant. From Alessandro’s blog entry for August 11:

I made it back to the Garden by 4:30 a.m., changed, and walk through the Steinhardt Conservatory toward Baby’s room—the bonsai museum. The entire conservatory smelled very, very funny! I entered the museum. The aroma could only be described as putrid. I spoke to Susan Pell, one of BBG’s botanists, who had camped there all night. She told me that the plant had started stinking at around 8 p.m. (Thursday) and gotten worse ever since.

It was bad, but not unbearable, when I walked in. I had read in many research papers that the odor comes in waves, so I wondered whether I was riding a wave or not. I was not. A wave hit me pretty soon—and it was rank! It was the kind of smell that makes you not want to know where it’s coming from—the smell of a lot of things rotting all at the same time. …

As the morning wore on, I became more and more comfortable around the plant, and it occurred to me that the arum had already entered its declining phase, when it slowly reduces its emissions till it stops smelling. I was right. By the time we opened the door to BBG visitors (8 a.m.), there was very little smell left.

So, had I gotten there first thing Friday morning, I still would not have had the full experience of the plant, and might not have smelt anything. Mark Fisher described the smell as “like a dead rat” and said that peak scent occurred about 4am Friday morning. Only BBG staff had the privilege of experiencing this. When I visited Friday afternoon, some claimed to still be catching whiffs of it, but I did not.

Chiari told me that he observed the spadix sweating – beads of fluid on the structure – at 5am. He also describes this in his blog entry. The spadix is the source of the aroma. I speculated on this blog Thursday evening that equipment set up at the bloom, which I saw on the Web cam, was for temperature monitoring. Chairi said they considered it, but it would have required invasive probes and they didn’t want to jeopardize the bloom. He explained that the equipment I saw was actually collecting samples of the aroma from the air around the bloom. Knowing what I know now, this makes more sense, since the equipment was “aimed” at the spadix, and not the interior of the spathe.

BBG’s Titan Arum Web Cam, sampled at 06:35 EDT on August 11, 2006.

Chiari pollinated the female flowers at 12:30pm on Friday, August 11. The timing of the pollination was surprising to me. I had thought that the smell was timed to the receptiveness of the female flowers. Apparrently, they remain receptive for at least several hours after the scent has started to fade. Chiari also told me that they would be collecting pollen from the male flowers on Saturday. BBG got their pollen from Virgina Tech, which had just had a bloom the previous week. BBG’s pollen will be made available to the next bloom’s caretakers.

When I visited on Friday afternoon, the rim of the spathe had darkened, and even withered slightly, in some spots. The texture of the spadix had also changed from my visit Wednesday evening, before the spathe had unfurled, and was not as “turgid” as it had been. Nothing widespread, with the male flowers bloom still ahead, but the first signs of decline.

Detail of the rim of the spathe, showing the first signs of decline. Be sure to look at the large version of this, and see if you can find the fly on the rim!

Detail of spadix and most of the rim of the spathe. A fly (the same one as before, I think) is clearly visible on the spadix. Compare the texture of the spadix in this picture with the photos I took on August 9, two days before.

Botanical architecture, a detail view of the underside of the spathe, shot from below.

Finally, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, some establishing shots to provide context for where all this was going on.

Google Earth satellite photo of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. North is at the top of the picture. The greenhouses are in the middle right of the photo. Other landmarks: The Brooklyn Museum is the large building at the top of the picture. Prospect Park Zoo is in the middle of the photo, across Flatbush Avenue from BBG. At the bottom of the picture, between Ocean Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, the red-roofed structure is the Prospect Park subway station, the stop I take to get to BBG by subway.

Google Earth satellite photo of the BBG greenhouses and Lily Pool Terrace. The oval glass house at the top of the picture is the Palm Court, used for formal events such as receptions, ceremonies, fundraisers and so on. Below that is the gift shop and offices. I’ve outlined the Bonsai House in green, and the yellow-white dot shows where “Baby” has been located. This and all the other structures in the lower part of the photo comprise the Steinhardt Conservatory. The large greenhouses on the lower right are the aquatic and other greenhouses. The three octagonal greenhouses are, top to bottom, the warm temperate, tropical, and desert pavilions.

Photo taken from the Lily Pool Terrace, showing the entrance to the Gift Shop, and the Bonsai House. Look at the break in the foliage just to the left of the lamp post. You can see the spadix of A. titanum in the Bonsai House.

Just outside the Bonsai House, the spadix is now clearly visible, as are the visitors inside and outside. You can also see the Web Cam located high on the wall on the right hand side

Inside the Bonsai House, with “Baby” and visitors. This gives you a good sense of scale for the bloom: it’s over 65″ tall, not including the pot!.

View from the other end of the hall, looking back toward the entrance. You can see the Web Cam high on the opposite wall.

Well, campers, it’s now past 2:30am. It’s taken me two hours to put all this together for you. If you’ve read this far, I know you’ve gotten something out of it! Please leave comments with any questions I haven’t answered, or even just to let me know what you liked about all this. It’s been an exciting time. I look forward to the next time when plants and their admiring geeks make news in the larger world, and we can all feel appreciated for our obsessions, at least for a few days.

[bit.ly]

Previous posts:

• August 11, 2006: Baby got back! and 8/11 flickr set
• August 10, 2006: Happy Corpse Flower Day!, Field Trip Notes, 2 of 3, and 3 of 3
• August 9, 2006: Field Trip Notes, 1 of 3 and What’s in a name?
• August 7, 2006: Titan arum to bloom at BBG

Links

• BBG’s Titan Arum pages
• Wikipedia article
• My August 9 and August 11 flickr sets

[Updated 2006.08.11-0637: Additional Web cam image sampled this morning.]

Mark Fisher, foreman of the Steinhardt Conservatory and curator of the Tropical Pavilion at BBG, describes A. titanum‘s life cycle and growth patterns and the history of BBG’s specimen.



A. titanum spends many years cycling between growth and dormancy before blooming. With each cycle of growth, the plant sends up a single shoot. Most of these are vegetative, not reproductive, sending up a single compound leaf on a long stalk. In the photos above, you can see a small specimen of A. titanum which gives you an indication of the shape and proportions of the leaf. The leaf stores energy in the underground tuber, which gets larger with each cycle. If the leaf is damaged before completing its cycle, the plant can die.

This almost happened to BBG’s specimen, “Baby”, over the past year. Baby is ten years old. Last fall, it sent up a giant single leaf which grew to, if my notes from Fisher’s lecture are correct, 18′ high by 8′ across. The tuber leapt in size, and began to push out the sides of its container. Early this year, the plant, no longer adequately supported by its now rounded container, toppled over, breaking the stem of the leaf. The greenhouse crews splinted the leaf with two-by-fours (and you thought staking tomatoes was challenging!), saving the leaf, and the plant.

When the plant again went dormant this year, they weighed the tuber at 40 pounds. This is still a baby for A. titanum, whose tubers can grow to 200 pounds at maturity. For this reason, when it broke dormancy in June, they expected another single leaf to emerge. Instead, when the first hint of spadix showed, they knew they had a bloom instead of just a leaf.

Due to the limited space in the Bonsai House to view the plant, three lecture sessions were scheduled, 20 minutes apart, limited to 50 people each. Twenty minutes was not enough time for all the questions I had, let alone those of other guests.

At the end of the second session, I did manage to ask Fisher if they were also going to monitor the temperature of the bloom. Since many aroids increase their temperature, I wondered if this plant did as well. Mark said that he heard they were going to do that. From the photos below, it looks like they are.

BBG’s Titan Arum Web Cam, sampled at 22:25 EDT on August 10, 2006.

BBG’s Titan Arum Web Cam, sampled at 06:35 EDT on August 11, 2006.

There were technical difficulties with the lecture sessions. There was not enough time, for sure. They also didn’t speak to all their audience. This was theater in the round, after all; it’s important to use the entire “stage” and to spend some time facing each section of the audience. Related to this was the lack of amplification. An empty greenhouse doesn’t have the best acoustics even under the most favorable circumstances. During my visit, the ventilation machinery of the greenhouse kicked in, with clanks and clangs which I would have found musical had I not already been straining to hear the words of a speaker ten feet off facing away from me.

Most things BBG, and especially Chiari and Fisher, did well. They compressed a lot of information into very limited time. I was already familiar with most of what they were sharing with us, so I wasn’t worried about not catching all of it. But it also provided an opportunity to talk about the importance of habitat conservation, the impacts of plant predation by unscrupulous collectors, and the tenuous grip on survival that many species already have without our help to push them over the brink. Most of all, they shared their wonder, their joy, their plant geek natures with us. And I, fellow geek, felt at home.

BBG opens at 8am. I’m going to try to be there first thing in the morning, before I go into work, to see what in person what changes have occurred overnight. And to see if I can catch a whiff of that infamous smell …

Previous posts:

• Earlier today: Happy Corpse Flower Day! and Field Trip Notes, 2 of 3
• August 9, 2006: Field Trip Notes, 1 of 3 and What’s in a name?
• August 7, 2006: Titan arum to bloom at BBG

Links:

• BBG’s Titan Arum pages
• Wikipedia article
• My flickr set of photos from the visit

Dr. Alessandro Chiari, Plant Propagator at BBG, explaining A. titanum bloom morphology, behavior, and ecology.




Titan arum’s bloom structure and sequence has elements common to many, if not most, aroids. Blooms of plants in this family don’t just have exotic (and, if you’re of such a mind, suggestive) structure, they exhibit behavior:

1. The spathe, the outer sheath of the bloom, will continue to pull away from the spadix, widening and deepening in color as it does. When fully open, it will be a few feet in diameter.
2. As the spathe opens, the female flowers, in a band at the very bottom of the spadix, will begin to bloom and become receptive to pollination. It’s at this time only that the bloom becomes “fragrant.”
3. The fragrance attracts pollinators, in this case: carrion beetles and sweat bees, which are attracted to the scent of rotting flesh in which to lay their eggs.
4. Not finding any rotting flesh, they continue to hang out, depositing any pollen they have brought in from visiting other Titan arums.
5. Having been pollinated, the female flowers begin to wither.
6. The male flowers, in a band just above the female flowers on the spadix, become fertile and begin to express pollen.
7. The scent dies. The beetles and bees, with nothing to keep them there, begin to leave the base of the spadix. As they do, they pick up fresh pollen from the male flowers on their way up the spadix and out of the spathe.
8. After that, the spadix and spathe collapse and the plant, hopefully, sets seed.

This precisely timed choreography enforces cross-pollination between different plants. Since the female flowers bloom before the male flowers, not even trace amounts of pollen from the same plant will be around to fertilize the female flowers. It does require available pollinators and enough blooming plants within flying distance of each other.

Even in the wild, this is not a certainty by any means. Habitat destruction and collection of the plant have reduced its numbers and the possibility that two plants will bloom close enough in time and space for successful pollination.

In cultivation, when the most recent bloom was weeks or months before and thousands of miles away, the propagators must step in. BBG received pollen from Virgina Tech on August 8. When the female flowers are ripe, Alessandro Chiari, BBG’s Plant Propagator, will step in to pollinate them. BBG hopes to collect the seed from their plant and propagate more of it.

Continue reading …

Previous posts:

• Earlier today: Happy Corpse Flower Day!
• August 9, 2006: Field Trip Notes, 1 of 3
  
• August 9, 2006: What’s in a name?
• August 7, 2006: Titan arum to bloom at BBG

Links:

• BBG’s Titan Arum pages
• Wikipedia article
• My flickr set of photos from the visit

[Updated 2006.08.10 20:15 EDT: Added link to today’s article in the New York Times.]

We made it to BBG this evening, and I was not disappointed. To see all the photos, visit the flickr set I created for them.

A. titanum, detail of where the spadix emerges from the spathe. This picture best captures the subtle colors and sensuous textures of this magnificent plant.

The Cliff Notes version:

• The flower does not smell. Yet. The infamous stench erupts only while the female flowers are receptive, which may be only a few hours.
• BBG staff can’t predict exactly when it will peak.
• It may peak as early as this Friday, or as late as Monday. You can visit their Titan arum webcam page to keep track of its progress.
• The fact that it’s blooming at all is unexpected. They only learned barely two weeks ago that the current growth of the plant is a bloom and not a leaf.
• This evening’s program included brief lectures by Dr. Alessandro Chiari, BBG’s plant propagator, and Mark Fisher, foreman of BBG’s Steinhardt Conservatory.
• There was not enough time for me to ask all the questions I had.

My first encounter with A. titanum, taken through the windows of the Bonsai House. Note the open windows. These open directly onto the patio where they serve food and drink from the Terrace Cafe. I wonder what will happen to appetites when the bloom peaks and reeks.
There were several local film crews there when we arrived, interviewing the BBG staff and a few visitors. I don’t know why he’s looking at me funny!

Stepping just inside the Bonsai House, we see the placement of “Baby” and film crew interviewing some of the visitors. The flat stones in the foreground and the empty benches around the perimeter normally house BBG’s bonsai collection.

A view of (nearly) the entire bloom. The enveloping spathe is starting to pull away from the central spadix. Where the spathe overlaps itself can be considered the “front” of the flower. The sign to the right reads “CORPSE FLOWER, TITAN ARUM, Amorphophallus titanum, Sumatra, Indonesia”.

A couple of detail shots of the spadix emerging from the spathe, shot from different places around the plant. The ribbing of the spathe will support it when it opens fully, like a huge burgundy velvet dress, at peak bloom. The whole thing has a rather muscular and animalistic feel to it. It reminded me of Audrey II from “Little Shop of Horrors” which I saw years ago at the Orpheum Theatre in the East Village.

Continue reading …

Previous posts:

• August 9, 2006: What’s in a name?
• August 7, 2006: Titan arum to bloom at BBG

Links:

• BBG’s Titan Arum pages
• Wikipedia article
• My flickr set of photos from the visit
• New York Times, August 10: Brooklyn’s Bloom, a Sight (and Stench) Not to Be Missed (requires registration/subscription)