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SYDNEY - If you like nicknames, it goes by the moniker of the corpse flower.
If you are into classics, its Latin name of amorphophallus titanum translates as "giant deformed penis".
Either way, the giant Sumatran titan arum is about to present one of the world's rarest botanical
events in Sydney, in stereo.
Beginning this Friday, all going well, the first of two titan arums will bloom with a stomach-curdling stench at the Royal Botanical Gardens' tropical centre. The second is expected to spread its distinct odour of rotting flesh the following week, bringing joy to botanists who wait years for this it to happen.
Outside the darkest corners of Sumatran rainforests, bloomings of world's largest and worst-smelling flower are few and far between: fewer that 17 in the United States, with others only in Germany, France, Britain and Sweden.
In Australia, one bloomed in the Flecker Botanic Gardens in Cairns in 2003, and the following year Sydney's first rancid flower emerged to a welcome from 16,000 amazed Sydneysiders.
Few plants are as strange.
For most of its life the titan arum squats underground as a giant, potato-like tuber that can reach 100kg in weight, periodically shooting up a single leaf that looks like a branch with a number of separate leaves.
In Sydney, the leaf will rise to about 2m. In Sumatra it can hit twice that height.
The plant will stay in leaf for anywhere between six and 18 months, feeding energy to the tuber - allowing it to grow larger each time - before dying back.
The plant repeats the cycle until the tuber is big enough to push up a flower, but no leaves.
And even that is somewhat deceptive. The apparently single bloom is actually a flower structure, comprising many male and female flowers at the base.
This can grow to spectacular sizes, the largest on record being measured at 3m high. And it will last only three or four days.
"It's pretty wild," said Stephen Bartlett, the gardens' nursery facilities co-ordinator.
The flower opens and emits its foul stench to attract carrion beetles and sweat bees - what else? - which transfer pollen to produce seeds, which appear as bright orange balls on the stem and which in turn are picked up by birds and distributed throughout the jungle.
In Sydney they will be collected and used to help preserve a plant that is now endangered by poaching and forest clearing.
Finding them in the wild is hard enough.
Bartlett said when British celebrity naturalist David Attenborough went searching for one for his television series The Private Life of Plants, he needed local experts to track one down.
Having two bloom now makes Bartlett feel almost like an expectant father, if of very odd offspring.
"Yeah, it gets sort of quite important. You want it all to happen because around here it gets a bit crazy and everyone's talking about it," Bartlett said.
"You want everything to go fine and you're always doing things to make sure it flowers."
