EXCURSIONS

GARDENS

Plants With No Common Scents

Spaceships, stubby old men, and Amazon lily pads abound in this botanical wonderland

By Jack McClintock

With an odor like that of a dead possum rotting by the side of the road, Alice the Amorphophallus burst into flower at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden on Friday the 13th of May. Thousands of visitors drove in to sniff the seven-and-a-half-foot-tall bloom—also known as the titan arum, corpse flower, or plain Mr. Stinky—which is pollinated by carrion beetles and sweat bees. The plant is native to Sumatra, where logging threatens it with extinction. Luckily for Alice, one of Fairchild’s key missions is to propagate endangered species. It is also the only botanical garden in the United States where tropical plants grow outdoors year-round.

The Fairchild is a combination living museum, laboratory, herbarium, university, and horticultural consultancy with grounds that cover 83 acres and include a glorious array of vast lawns and palm-ringed lakes, gloomy rain forests, cactus displays, flame-vine-covered pergolas, and coral-rock terracing walls. Founded in 1938, the garden is named for David Fairchild, a plant explorer who traveled the world for 37 years by mule, foot, airplane, and Chinese junk collecting plants for the Department of Agriculture. “Every American uses something David Fairchild introduced, every day of their life,” says John Pipoly, the garden’s director of tropical plant conservation. Among them are soybeans from China, durum wheat, hops, nectarines, avocados, dates, horseradish, and bamboo.