Plus: SF’s Chinese New Year Parade draws record crowds (and record public transit ridership).
San Francisco is no stranger to floral anomalies. The city, which houses a litany of public gardens and world-class greenhouses — not to mention one of the country’s most celebrated outdoor botanical gardens — often makes the media rounds when one of its resident corpse flowers blooms, unraveling a large flowering body and filling the nearby air with an intense scent, hence its name.
Last year, “Scarlet,” one of the oldest corpse flowers in San Francisco, unfurled in a crowd-drawing manner, attracting patrons to the Conservatory of Flowers who waited hours to get within eyesight (and smelling distance) of the nearly ten-foot-tall flower. A lesser-known, though equally as magnificent, Corpse Flower resides at the California Academy of Sciences, resulting from a generous donation by the Conservatory of Flowers in 2017. And that flower, named “Mirage,” is set to bloom any day now.
“Mirage, a Corpse Flower (Amorphophallus titanum) that the Conservatory of Flowers donated to the California Academy of Sciences in 2017, is about to bloom,” reads a post on Instagram published by the museum.
Per Cal Academy, the vast majority of San Francisco’s corpse flowers are in the Conservatory of Flowers; the aforenoted greenhouse currently has five individual examples of the massive flower —”Scarlet, Chanel, Amor, Summa, and Terra” — with Mirage being gifted to the museum when the plant was around one or two years old.
“Since [arriving], Mirage has produced two large leaves and has been quietly storing energy while growing in the Cal Academy’s rainforest,” continues the post. Unlike other species of flowers, corpse flowers take an unusually long time to mature and blossom; on average, these flowers — each capable of reaching upwards of 15 feet tall — take between seven to nine years to mature. Once they do mature, the flower blooms for just two or three days before wilting away. During that blooming period, the flower’s terracotta-colored interior flesh and namesake aroma attract pollinators far and wide, allured by both its color and, say, unique smell. (You won’t find this Sumatran flower listed as an ingredient on a bottle fragrance anytime soon.)
According to Cal Academy, the flower’s “leaf stage” lasts between twelve and eighteen months, followed by several months of dormancy. This cyclical back-and-forth continues for several years until the plant has accumulated enough energy to bloom.
“Blooms are rare so keep an eye out for updates on Mirage in the next couple of days,” concludes Cal Academy. Given the viral popularity of past blooms, we’ll surely be on the lookout… though we’ll make sure we arrive at the Golden Gate Park culture space on an empty stomach before viewing it, IRL.
What else transpired over the weekend (and these past few days)? Let’s take a look.
- SF’s Chinese New Year parade broke records and was rife with pre-pandemic nostalgia. Tens of thousands of onlookers inundated the sidewalks in SF’s Chinatown Saturday for this year’s Chinese New Year Parade, which included a run of nineteen floats and a snaking 288-foot-long dragon that caused more than a few jaws to drop; Saturday also saw BART record a record post-pandemic ridership figure for the day. More info.
- The new uniform San Francisco Giants players leave… um… little to the imagination. Press interviews with Casey Schmitt show him… let’s just say “manhood” showing through a veil of basically opaque tissue paper; it’s a big win for baseball butt fans, mind you — (though it’s hard to imagine alterations won’t be made to these uniforms in wake of the revealing photos already crisscrossing the internet). More info.
- Someone may or may not be purposely setting Teslas on fire in SF’s SoMa neighborhood. SFPD is actively investigating two vehicle fires, each involving a Tesla, as potential arson cases; the two electric vehicles were set ablaze within a few blocks of each other in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood this past Saturday. More info.
- SFGate has launched a “Best of” series/competition. Categories open for nominations include “Best Stairway,” “Best Bar Nook,” “Best Store Pet,” and about a dozen more. More info.
