Creepy plants for Halloween

Call that scary, kid, you with the blood drenched costume and your buddy with the axe? I have far scarier things in my garden. You wouldn’t get out of my backyard alive after chomping on some of the plants I grow, and my shed is fully equipped with zombie fighting weapons. Gone are the delightfully fragrant flowers. It’s a plant cemetery now, filled with their decomposing remains.

The garden is now at that stage of annual decay, but it’s still a fascinating place and I have no fears of anything residing there. As for corpses, I do have one plant that does smell like something rotting, and I don’t mean from normal decomposition. It’s alive and flowering, and looking quite healthy. It’s a carrion plant, one of those unusual creations in nature that emit the, should I say fragrance, of rotting flesh.

You may be thinking of the famous ones that make headlines every time they flower, usually in a conservatory at a botanical garden where they’re typically grown. That’s the titan arum, or Amorphophallus titanium, also known as the corpse plant, and mistakenly described as the worlds largest flower. It’s certainly a huge plant. The current record of one in captivity is 3.2 metres. It reached that height in the Botanical Gardens Bonn, Germany in May 2013. The titan arum grows from a corm, and one set a record at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh weighing in at a remarkable 153.9 kg (339 lb). As for being the largest flower, well it does produce the largest bloom in the world, except it isn’t a single flower, but an inflorescence, that is a cluster of hundreds of tiny flowers.

The real champion in flower size is Rafflesia arnoldii, a strange plant that grows only in the rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo, where this brown speckled plant that looks a little like a fungus pokes up from forest floor to bloom for only a few days. It has no visible parts other than a single flower that can be as much as a meter across.

What all these plants have in common is the odour they produce to attract insects to carry out pollination, and because of that they’re known as carrion or corpse flowers. Amorphophallus konjac, or voodoo lily, is another one, and it’s quite a stinker. I made the mistake of growing one as a houseplant and to the dismay of the rest of the family it flowered while I was away. I returned to find it in the garage beside the garbage can. I still have a couple in the garden that are hardy enough to survive there. Fortunately, they can’t compete with all the sweeter smelling flowers.

My most recent experience with a carrion plan was this summer when a friend offered me a small Stapelia variegata, a houseplant also known as starfish cactus. I wasn’t familiar with it and left it outdoors until the beginning of this month when I moved it indoors where it surprised me by producing buds. I was so excited until it flowered, then the smell. Being a small plant, it wasn’t that noticeable from a few feet away, but up close it’s a nose wrinkler. I quickly moved it back outdoors before anyone else noticed — I didn’t want to find another plant beside the garbage again.

Despite the odour (it isn’t that bad) it is a fascinating plant. It’s a succulent, a plant that stores moisture in its leaves, but it’s not a cactus, despite looking similar. The flowers are flattened slightly like a starfish, and the ones on mine are speckled brown, although there are other cultivars in other colours. It’s a plant from southern Africa, and although the odour isn’t strong, I can’t imagine what it would be like to stumble into a huge patch growing on the veldt.

Too bad the timing is off. It would have been the perfect plant to set on the porch with the pumpkin. It might not scare anyone, but it would sure put them off the candy.