How a Giant Corpse Flower Got to an Abandoned Gas Station | Hacker News Reader

How a Giant Corpse Flower Got to an Abandoned Gas Station

atlasobscura.com

75 pointsturtlegrids21 comments

There is this plant that grew in our apartment building: https://imgur.com/a/gyxEA7X

It went from non existent to taller then the 2 story building in a month. A plant app I used identified it as Agave Americana. But I can't find any literature describing this accelerated growth.

Any ideas?

Edit: this is in Los Angeles California.

Edit2: Here is a video on May 9th for a better perspective -> https://imgur.com/gallery/ACHnWNy

That’s insane

Have you contacted any universities?

I did not know that was a thing to do.

It's a century plant, and it's flowering. That's the stalk.

Agave is a monocarpic plant [1] which means it flowers once and then dies. These plants essentially store energy for years (decades in the case of agave) in their leaves until they decide to spend all of it on a single bloom and that stalk/trunk means it's at the end of its life cycle. Once its done growing, you should see yellow (IIRC) flowers all the way at the top.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocarpic

Search for: Agave plant asparagus

https://www.coastkeeper.org/super-bloom-lifetime-agave-watch...

It's their death bloom.

That's fantastic. Thank you! Now onto printing tickets and charging visitors.

This is a very common plant. Now that you recognize them you'll likely notice them everywhere in road margins, gardens, etc.

Looks like it's flowering and will likely die shortly after. They're also known as century plants due to the length of time to flower.

last year one bloomed on Old Middlefield cross Rengstorff (where the old burrito place was) in MV, about 2 stories high. Majestic.

Wrt. corpse flower. 25 years ago i come one morning to work, a bit late as usual - i'm the IT - and the smell in my office is beyond description and it is emanated by that large phallic looking flower. The combination of look and smell is stunning, and my officemate (a very polite mid-age school teacher kind of woman) has an extremely strange expression on her face - on one side it is of a great proud - after all her "child", that flower she tended to for so long has finally bloomed in such a grandiose spectacular manner - on the other side she has already spent some time in the office and the tears in her eyes weren't just the tears of proud - it was just very hard to breath. I took the flower out into the hallway - we had that long hallway with offices' doors opening into it - and placed it toward one end of the hallway. 5 minutes later i hear the noise of tremendous excitement mixed with disgust - the people from the office closest to the flower got bothered by smell and walked out to check it out. Once they took their emotions under control they moved the flower to another end of the hallway. In few minutes people from the offices there got bothered by the smell ... That chess play with flower went for some time until finally somebody moved the flower into the stairway where during the day some people from the other floor also came to check out the source of the smell.

Yes is the last part of its life, flowering time. Will flower for a lot of time and then the mother plant will seed and die but not before growing tens of new small plants around. You will not lose the plant.

Anecdata. Your plant is also a close relative from Agave tequilana, the main ingredient of Tequila. The genus is easy to culture and lots of species are heavily used in dry gardens.

I saw this flower in person. There was a line about a quarter block long, distanced and in masks because that's how people were doing it on Alameda. One by one, the people in the line would go up to the flower and circle it taking a video with their phone, or taking selfies with the flower. The flower itself wasn't larger than many other plants you might see, but it was monolithic, as well as rare.

about two years ago Amazon’s Sphere had a corpse flower bloom for view, there was a huge line outside at 11pm and some local university researchers cut it to take the pollen etc because it is so rare.

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/crowds-pack-amazon-spheres-whi...

I had a sudden flashback remembering a "Lost In Space" episode on TV as a kid: haunted by the giant alien plants that threaten the Robinson family. I suppose the writer was rehashing "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers".

"The Great Vegetable Rebellion"?

With perhaps the worst costuming ever found in science fiction. https://lostinspace.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Vegetable_Rebe...

Ha ha, no not that one. The one that scared me was "Attack of the Monster Plants": https://lostinspace.fandom.com/wiki/Attack_of_the_Monster_Pl...

Ha! Funny that there are two attack of the plants episodes.

After unrooting and killing some big ones (not before to give a lot of my own blood in exchange for the sacrifice), I would prefer to fight a body snatcher than an agave again. This things are hard to kill.

We have a giant corpse glower at our city botanic gardens. I was not able to get to is flowering, but it was quite the local event.

I have the same story. I'm sad I missed it.

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