Como Park’s corpse flower is starting to stink — here’s how to watch it bloom

“Horace,” the fetid — and feted — corpse flower at Como Park Conservatory in St. Paul has started to stink, its handlers wrote in a social media post just before 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, a sign that a bloom should come soon. But as of Wednesday afternoon, it still hadn’t.

Since bloom watch started in earnest Sunday, a livestream (below) trained on the corpse flower has attracted sometimes hundreds of people at a time watching for signs that the giant flower would open. Corpse flowers do not bloom on a regular schedule. Instead, they store energy in an underground stem called a corm, blooming only once they have enough energy.

Their blooms tend to begin in the late afternoon, continuing into evening. They derive their name from the foul odor they emit in order to attract pollinators. The stench lasts about 12 hours, and soon the bloom collapses. Corpse flowers are considered endangered and grow only in the wild in Sumatra, where their habitat has been devastated, Horace’s primary caregiver, horticulturist Jen Love, told the Star Tribune.

Horace, one of two corpse flowers at Como, arrived in 2019. Its nickname comes from Horace Cleveland, a landscape architect who designed many Twin Cities green spaces. This is the first time Horace has bloomed, while the other corpse flower has yet to.

Livestream watchers have been holding a sort of vigil over the plant for days, fretting in the comments.

When a man filming a TV segment put his hands on and kissed Horace Tuesday, causing the plant to wobble, backlash from the plant’s protective fanbase was swift.

When the livestream went down early Wednesday, streamers lamented that Horace might be doing something, finally, that they couldn’t see. (Horace did not bloom overnight, a staffer commented Wednesday morning around 7:30 a.m.) The feed was back 15 minutes later to one typed chant of “HORACE HORACE HORACE!”

Como Conservatory is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.