The world’s largest flower is also its ugliest

Plants regularly lose out to animals in the charisma stakes. In Pathless Forest, Chris Thorogood seeks to promote a new face of Southeast Asian conservation: Rafflesia, one of the strangest and most gruesome plants on the planet.

Rafflesia is a parasitic plant, deriving everything that it needs from its host, spending most of its life as a microscopic thread hidden inside a vine. It cannot photo-synthesise and survives without roots, stem or leaves. Once every few years, buds emerge which take nine months to mature. Finally open, the enormous five-lobed flowers resemble slabs of bloody, white-flecked meat. Most spectacular of all is Rafflesia arnoldii, the largest single flower in the world, a metre across, weighing up to 10kg. And then there’s the smell. The flower not only emits the scent of rotting flesh; it heats up to spread the odour, attracting pollinating carrion flies (hence its common name, ‘corpse flower’). After five days of stinking, fly-blown glory, the flower subsides into a mass of black slime.

There are 42 known species of Rafflesia across Southeast Asia, mainly in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. Each species occurs on only one island, and populations are confined to specific forest locations, some very remote. Because of their rarity and unpredictable flowering, not every Rafflesia species has been fully described by botanists. Increasingly, their forest habitats are threatened by logging, agriculture and encroaching coffee and oil palm plantations. With such a high risk of extinction, botanists and foresters across the region are co-ordinating efforts to describe Rafflesia, encourage responsible ecotourism and involve indigenous people in protecting the plant.