The stench of death emanates from Jeff’s balls

July 13, 2023 8:56 PM

Corpse flower blooming at Amazon Spheres in Seattle The rare flowers can be up to 9 foot tall and stink of carrion in order to attract pollinators and bloom for 48 hours. More from United States Botanic Garden.
posted by Artw (19 comments total)

I feel like I'm missing a reference.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:09 PM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

It’s a death flower in a glass dome.
posted by Artw at 9:12 PM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Amazon Spheres are colloquially refered to as Jeff's Balls
posted by Gorgik at 9:14 PM on July 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

The Amazon Spheres are colloquially refered to as Jeff's Balls

And there it is!
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:16 PM on July 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oh yeah, the big glass balls belong to a man named Jeff.

But mostly it is a cool flower.
posted by Artw at 9:17 PM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Corpse flowers are rare. There are fewer than 1,000 of them left in the wild

I had no idea there were so few of these. Just a few years ago, some friends bought a house near Portland and a corpse flower bloomed in the yard their first summer there. They had a steady stream of visitors for a few days.
posted by klausman at 9:58 PM on July 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

here's a list...Jeff's balls aren't on it.
posted by clavdivs at 10:13 PM on July 13, 2023

The smell is truly amazing. One bloomed near me a few years back and I went to see it. Despite knowing what it was supposed to smell like my first thought upon walking into the greenhouse was “oh no, something died in here!” and it took me a few moments to realize that no, the flower was that perfect of a mimic.
posted by lepus at 10:14 PM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

1000+ for the post title
posted by bendy at 11:09 PM on July 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

A+ title.
posted by Siempre La Luna at 12:23 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Metaphor Police? We have an outbreak of On-The-Nose Symbolism in Seattle! Can you send a clean-up crew?"
posted by Grangousier at 4:15 AM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

My workplace has a few of these and one or the other blooms every couple of years. I was able to come in early on the morning it bloomed this year and see it with just a couple other people - it was overwhelming and awesome.
posted by sciencegeek at 4:30 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

The local university where I live just had their's bloom about a month ago! The botanist was manually pollinating it in hopes of getting it to fruit.

Rare corpse flower blooms in Sewanee
posted by griffey at 6:02 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

I can't smell these flowers.

Years ago there were two blooming at the same time at my university. There were very long lines to get in but I had a friend that worked in the Botany department and could get us into the greenhouse at night after hours. A big group of friends went in and a few of us couldn't stand to be in the same section of the greenhouse because the smell was so overpowering. But I couldn't smell a thing.

I eventually put my head deep inside the bloom and maybe got a faint whiff of the stench, but that might have been me just wanting to be able to smell it and convincing myself I could smell something.
posted by msbrauer at 7:34 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Metaphor Police? We have an outbreak of On-The-Nose Symbolism in Seattle! Can you send a clean-up crew?"

I'm hearing this in my head in Sterling Archers's voice.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 8:12 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you haven't been to the balls, it's absolutely worth a visit sometime in the rare hours where they admit non-Amazon people. We all resent Amazon for creating these things as a private rather than public space, but I also went to the opening and learned about the architecture, the work done by the botanists, etc, and it's really a remarkable and interesting creation. It's just too bad it's usually occupied by Amazon people doing meetings.

We had a corpse flower in the Volunteer Park Conservatory a few years back and that is a much smaller space to be stuck with it! Such a funny thing for people to flock to, but there you have it.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:41 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

We just had one bloom at the SF Conservatory of Flowers last week. They have about 5 of the plants, so they usually have one blooming every few years. Another one bloomed last year.
posted by mike3k at 11:02 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thank you for decrypting the post, Gorgik.
posted by doctornemo at 5:40 PM on July 14, 2023

I don’t see how the pollinators naturally drawn to this thing wouldn’t also lay their eggs on it.

And if they did, those eggs would be a tremendous nitrogen resource for the plant and quite possibly for the development of the seeds directly, if the plant could get access to it.

Yet to do that, it would need a protease such as the fruits of figs have which I think allows figs to digest the bodies of some of their pollinators if not some of their eggs themselves, and make use of that nitrogen.

But I didn’t find any references to proteases in corpse flowers.
posted by jamjam at 2:03 PM on July 16, 2023