Totally strange flower

As a flower guy TPP is green with envy of anyone who has seen this beauty in the field, and that's funny because the plant is never ever is green itself.  This plant is a completely subterranean parasite that only surfaces to flower.  It superficially resembles a gigantic star flower (Stapelia) because it is fly pollinated.  But so hard to describe. You'll have to go see for yourselves. It's easier than going to Borneo, a place TPP has never been. TPP has wrote about one of its cousins before.

A damned big Jack-in-the-pulpit

If you've never seen, or smelled, an Amorphophallus in flower, it's something to see (see if you can figure out the name).  Like all aroids, this isn't a flower, but an inflorescence and a modified leaf, a bract, in the terminology of the family, a spadix and a spathe.  Hundreds of unisexual flowers are hidden from view at the base of the spadix.  This is the titan, the largest such inflorescence in the world at 2+ meters tall.  TPP once had a smaller species bloom in his house, not exactly a planned event, but the basketball sized corm was being overwintered when it flowered.  This smaller species had an inflorescence just a bit over a meter tall and it was raised on a half-meter stalk.  The fragrance produced lures in pollinators, beetles and flies, and it smells like rotting flesh, carrion.  The pollinators use carrion for a brood substrate, which is not provided, so they are cruelly deceived by the plant. Beetles are particularly fun because as the beetles fly in they more or less fly directly into the pylon that is the spadix, and as the fall, the funnel like spathe dumps them down to the bottom where the female flowers are located, ready to be pollinated provided that the beetles have chanced upon another such aroid a bit earlier.  At any rate these are a lot of fun to see, in someone else's greenhouse. Many of these inflorescences also heat up, a mechanism for dispersing more of their attractant odor. Jolly good fun for the whole family.  Aroids aren't the only flowers that use such pollinators (see here, here, and here), aroids are just the most famous.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Star flower

The shorter days of fall stimulate quite a number of our greenhouse plants to flower especially if combined with a fall heat wave, and here in the upper midwest the highs all week have been in the 80s. A couple of species of star flower (Stapelia) were in full bloom, and it was obvious even from 20-30 feet away. Lots of people, including my students, think these plants are cacti; they're not. They are a stem succulent, but that is in no way any indication of a taxonomic affinity. Star flowers are members of the milkweed family. The flowers do sort of look like a star (fish). This one has that nice dried blood reddish brown color accompanied by the lovely fragrance of carrion, rotting flesh. These flowers function by deceiving flies who are seeking a brood substrate for their little babies (maggots), and in the process of searching for carrion, pollen gets moved from flower to flower. This is a cruel deception because the flies sometimes oviposite on the flower, but no reward in the form of carrion is provided. This is a special scratch-your-computer-monitor and sniff image, the absolute latest imaging technology (accomplished by using the food mode setting on my new camera).