Don't do this at home - Corpse plant flowers

Here's a video of the corpse plant flowering (Amorphophallus titanum). Yes, this video shows "flowering" but you don't see the flowers. This is basically one damned big jack-in-the-pulpit and a member of the aroid family, so there is a spike with flowers at its base and a big sterile apex ("jack" - the spadix) subtended by a modified leaf, a bract called the spathe (the pulpit). What's unusual about the titan arum is that the whole thing is so damned big and smells of incredibly bad, unless you like the odor of carrion.  What you see here is the sterile top of the spadix extending beyond the spathe which is what opens giving access to the many unisexual flowers at the base of the spadix.  Many of aroids flower using food and water stored in a big fleshy underground stem, a corm, and they do this in a season when their vegetative growth is dormant. In another season a big single leaf grows and the process of storing food for reproduction continues. The flowering of a corm is a big deal because it can take a number of years for a corm to get big enough to flower. TPP was given a tennis-ball-sized corm of a smaller species of Amorphophallus (Can you figure out the genus name?), and each year the corm was dug in the fall and stored in the basement in a pot of sand.  Each year it grew the corm got bigger and in 5 years it was the size of a volleyball or small basketball, and then while being stored a shoot emerged in February. So being curious TPP brought the pot upstairs and a 4 foot tall inflorescence appeared just like the titan arum, just much smaller, but hoo boy, it did smell.  Mrs. Phactor's curiosity quickly waned and demanded its removal. My colleagues being good biologists enjoyed showing the item to students all day long and explaining about pollination attractants and pollinators, floral placement, and pollination.  Great stuff.  Here's a diagram of the life cycle although it labels the corm as a tuber. 

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.

Largest flower?

Here's another news article about the blooming of the "world's largest flower", and every time this happens, they make the same mistake; the "corpse flower" isn't a flower.  No question about it though, the titan aroid is an amazing plant, and seeing it in flower in person is very impressive.  The flowering structure can be over 6 feet tall, but you'd be more impressed by the odor.  TPP had a smaller species flower in his house a few years back.  It's equivalent structure was about 3 feet tall and on a 2 foot stalk.  It smelled like someone had dragged a cow carcass into out house, so Mrs. Phactor said, "OUT!".  This type of aroid produces the  odor of rotting flesh, a corpse.  This is a giant jack-in-the-pulpit and consists of a cloaking leaf, a spathe, and a spike of lots of little flowers on it called a spadix, some male flowers and some female flowers, and maybe some sterile ones too. All you usually see is the apex of the spike sticking up unless you cut the spathe out of the way.  The flowers are down at the bottom. When flying in toward the carrion, the pollinators, probably beetles, hit the spike and tumble into the funnel formed by the spathe.  So sorry, it's not a flower anymore than a sunflower is a flower.  Curiously the world's largest flower (Rafflesia) is also a carrion flower and it's plant is a complete parasite living under ground except for the flowers.