arum

Unsurprisingly, the titan arum’s unsavory cocktail includes many sulfur-containing compounds, that shock-yellow element often found near volcanoes that characterizes everything from rotting eggs to bad breath.

It’s also largely responsible for the smell of the delicately-named dead horse arum, a relative of the so-called corpse flower, or titan arum.

Putricia is one of several titan arums in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens, which last saw one bloom 15 years ago.

Visitors to the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers are about to witness the rare blooming of a titan arum, or corpse flower.

But on that fateful night, researchers waited all night for that to happen to one arum species in the rainforest, Syngonium hastiferum.