Crowds Line Up to See — and Smell — Corpse Flower ‘Chanel’ in SF

The day after “Chanel” bloomed, people lined up on Wednesday at San Francisco’s Conservatory of Flowers for a chance to catch a glimpse — and a whiff — of the human-sized corpse flower.

Dozens raised cameras and phones over their heads to snap photos of the flower’s striking burgundy bloom and yellow spike. One person looked on from a few feet away behind the safety of a white mask, perhaps as a barrier from the pungent aroma, a cross between a wet dog and ground beef abandoned in a hot afternoon sun.

The pungent smell wasn’t as strong as the night before, said Lindzy Bivings, interpretive programs manager at the Gardens of Golden Gate Park, which oversees the Conservatory of Flowers. Hours after Chanel bloomed on Tuesday night, visitors could smell the stinkiness from outside the conservatory walls.

“If you were here in the park last night, you could smell it way outside the building. It was phenomenal,” Bivings added.

After building anticipation over the past week, the Amorphophallus titanum — what most people know as a corpse flower — the conservatory extended its hours through Wednesday afternoon so people could capitalize on a brief window of up to 48 hours that it will remain in bloom.

By Wednesday, the stench had toned down, but visitors could still smell Chanel’s stinkiness.

“I got a faint smell of rotting meat in the air,” one visitor said at the conservatory, Rachel Thomas. “It smells like when you’re in the car and you’re driving and you’re like, I know something’s dead on the side of the road, but I don’t see it yet.”

“It’s beautiful. The color is incredible,” Thomas said. “The contrast of the inside of the [bloom] versus the outside is really, really beautiful.”

Another visitor was amazed at how massive the flower looks in real life. “When I saw it, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s huge. Is that a flower?’” said 10-year-old Keats Schwartz. “People are always saying that it stinks, but it’s not bad. It smells like spongy and mildewy and like wet.”

Chanel is part of a larger conservation effort among botanical gardens worldwide to preserve corpse flowers.

Chanel follows in the footsteps of other famous Conservatory blooms, including Scarlet in 2023 and Mirage in 2024, which the conservatory gifted to the California Academy of Sciences in 2017.

Corpse flowers are the largest and most “pungent inflorescence,” a term used to describe a cluster of flowers. They only bloom once every three to five years. And when they do, their stench is rancid. People have likened the smell of the bloom to wet socks and dead animals.

The corpse flower has a tall central spike, called a spadix, which actually heats up and helps diffuse the smelly odor into the air. A petal-like structure, known as the spathe, surrounds the spadix. The spathe is green on the outside and a deep red, almost burgundy color on the inside. And that’s supposed to resemble rotting flesh.

That “rotting flesh” and the strong odor are ways the corpse flower tricks pollinators into visiting. It’s called a deceptive pollination strategy.

These flowers are native to the islands of Sumatra in Indonesia. In fact, the name of the flower is a direct translation of the words “bunga bangkai,” which in Bahasa Indonesia translates to “corpse flower.”

Only a few thousand corpse flowers are remaining in the wild in Indonesia and neighboring regions, and they’re considered threatened and endangered.

Botanical gardens around the world — including the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco — are part of a large conservation effort to preserve these corpse flowers.