The last time Scarlet bloomed at the Conservatory of Flowers was nearly three years ago, drawing long lines to the greenhouse … that smelled of rotting, sun-warmed flesh.
San Francisco’s no stranger to purposefully massive, offensively malodorous flowering bodies. In fact, the seven-by-seven contains one of the largest collections of these cadaver-inspired blossoms anywhere in the country … and world. Outside of New York City and Los Angeles, which have 21 and 46 corpse flowers currently in greenhouses, respectively, San Francisco’s captive cluster is among the largest anywhere in the country. (For context: The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates less than 160 mature corpse flowers remain in the wild; a cocktail of rapid deforestation and climate crisis outcomes has decimated their endemic, with the IUCN finding that their wild population has reduced by some 50% over the past century.)
Within the next few days, an example at SF’s Conservatory of Flowers, aptly named Scarlet, will bloom and perfume the iconic glass house with top notes of decaying road kill.
View this post on Instagram
“Let the countdown begin, we expect Scarlet to bloom within the next 5 days,” the culture center posted on Instagram Saturday, June 20th. Scarlet started showing signs of ripening earlier last week; an earlier post on June 12th read that the greenhouse was expecting Scarlet to bloom within one or two weeks, but that estimation has been truncated to just days, due to Scarlet’s towering spadix and ruffling spathe, the cabbage-like frills around the spadix, maturing at a faster rate than expected. One tell-tale sign of an imminent blossoming is the spathe blushing a scarlet red — a nod to the flower’s namesake alias.
Corpse flowers bloom historically lure big crowds to the Conservatory and Cal Academy of Sciences, the only two institutions in San Francisco that house these rare plants; it’s wise to keep an ear to the proverbial ground (read: an eye on the respective instructions social media handles) in the days leading up to a bloom for ticket information and special viewing times. For those who can’t, in this case, visit the Conservatory during Scarlet’s maroon pageant number, a livestream will run for the bloom’s two- or three-day duration; a precise link to an active stream will be shared on gggp.org by the greenhouse when the bloom begins.
View this post on Instagram
Scarlet previously bloomed nearly three years ago to the date on July 3rd, 2023; earlier this month, two corpse flowers bloomed simultaneously in the U.S. Botanical Garden — an (almost) once-in-a-lifetime happening.
Feature image: Courtesy of Instagram, via [at]conservatoryofflowers
