Here’s a message you don’t expect to receive while on vacation: Your corpse flower is about to bloom.
That’s what Dawn Freeman heard last week. She’s a biology instructor at Washington State University Vancouver who serves as the primary caretaker for the school’s resident corpse plant, Titan VanCoug.
The rare plant, among the tallest and smelliest in existence, has developed a following in Vancouver. Years ago, an overwatering accident caused the campus’s plant to explode and clone itself. Now instead of once every four to six years, it’s been blooming almost every year.
Freeman calls the plant her baby. As she watched a livestream of the odd plant on her phone, she hoped she’d be back in time to tend to its blooming-related needs.
“I got back Friday and then went to brunch the next day with my family and I had it on the stream while we were eating. It still didn’t seem ready,” Freeman said. “But when I got there Saturday afternoon to show my family the campus, it had opened up. That was the beginning of my weekend.”
What is a corpse flower?
Native to the remote, humid Indonesian island of Sumatra, the corpse flower gets its name from a rotting flesh-like smell it emits during a bloom. Its appearance is just as strange, almost like a giant greenish-red banana. The weekend’s bloom, the fourth in six years, reached 5 feet, 5 inches.
As of early Monday afternoon, Titan VanCoug’s infamous stench still soaked the nearby hallways of its home in the school’s engineering building, but the tip of the plant — known as the spadex — had started to wilt and discolor, looking a bit like the tip of a wizard’s hat.
Freeman, who spent the entirety of her Sunday monitoring and pollinating Titan VanCoug, said the plant has stopped blooming earlier than expected for the fourth time — a phenomenon she thinks is most related to climate but can’t say for certain.
“It’s been a very quiet weekend, but it was still a beautiful bloom,” Freeman said. “But then it closed prematurely again, and we don’t know why. Before (in 2022) we thought it was too hot. Maybe it was too cold.”
Again? How? Why?
Vancouver has likely become more well-versed in the obscure corpse flower than the average community. In 2019, Titan VanCoug bloomed for the first time, drawing thousands of visitors to the school’s small campus.
Blooms in 2022 and 2023 drew crowds as well, but smaller in size. Some were still new to the strange sight; others returned as superfans.
As what was once described as a must-see oddity becomes more of a yearly occurrence for Vancouver, Freeman said what she’s now most interested in isn’t the bloom itself.
“I need to get in the dirt. What’s more fascinating to me is finding out what’s going on under there,” Freeman said.
Freeman said that because of the cloning incident years ago, it’s almost as if there are four separate plants in the same pot, all at different stages of the life cycle. Three of the four plants have already bloomed. This year’s bloom is the same plant that bloomed in 2019.
The rapidly changing schedule of the plant challenges Freeman’s ability to dig it up and potentially re-pot it.
“There’s always something happening in the pot. And I certainly can’t lift anything out with that leaf still in there,” Freeman said. “How much do I want to risk disturbing things? Well, a lot, but it’s hard.”
The answer to Freeman’s questions can’t exactly be answered with a quick Google search. Only a few dozen such plants exist in captivity across the country. Freeman suspects there might not be others with the same crowded-pot situation as Titan VanCoug.
“It’s hard to do research on it because the generation period is so long. Even if you did it for your whole life you wouldn’t get there,” Freeman said. “I’m lucky that we’ve had three in a row to learn as much as we had, but it still just gives us new questions every time.”
The one plant in the pot that hasn’t bloomed before currently exists as a “leaf” — a 10-foot-tall sprout that looks more like a tree. Freeman said what’s most likely to happen next is that the leaf will slowly die back, readying itself for a bloom sometime around summer 2026.
That means that next summer might be bloomless. Of course, it’s all just theory.
“Titan does what Titan does,” Freeman said.
