Voodoo Lily - Amorphophallus - See What's Soooooooo Smelly in the Burrell Garden

Walking in the Burrell Garden Series

Voodoo Lily Blooms - Mystery of the Dead Critter Solved

 

 

Voodoo lily and Snake lily are common names for Amorphophallus, a genus of some 170 tropical and subtropical tuberous herbaceous plants of the Arum family.

 

 

 

I came across a florist once called 'Flowers of Extinction' - seriously they make a killing selling dead flowers to the jilted, for shock value, and great joke factor for those birthdays we best leave alone.  Should anyone ever market a perfume to that would compliment the dead flower bouquet, the voodoo lily should be the main ingredient.
 "Dead road kill" Festering for a couple of days in the heat, when you pass by with the window up, you still find the smell disgusting and memorable. The voodoo lily , native to  Asia, from Japan to China to Indonesia. But the flowers beauty and alien uniqueness, out way the stench that only lasts for several days. Flies race to the stinky smell and fill the voluminous bloom , pollinating the flower in the process of looking for the promised land of rotting carrion.

Seriously this is one of our favorite plants and all look forward the the day the plant matures to show off its impressive flowers that is several feet high. Later I will show y'all a later video of the foliage that follows.

 

Small corms (bulb like) with concave top, should be planted sideways in ground for growing success

One note of importance, if you order the bulb like I did the first go, at a luxurious price of 25.00 at the time it first started becoming available, we sadly lost it over the winter. Large and round the bulb has a concave area at the roof , if you don't tilt the bulb when planting, it collects water, and sadly it will freeze, split the bulb, which of course kills it. It was several years later that Scott and I purchased another one, after the grower told us this little tid bit, "turn the bulb sideways when planting", well success has blessed us ever since.


Newly sprouting Amorphophallus