“Hey–I just saw this come across the wire. I’ve heard about these things – the largest flower in the world. Any interest in checking it out tomorrow evening?” my friend Nick wrote in an e-mail.

I don’t care much about botany and I find trips to botanical gardens lobotomizing, but a corpse-smelling flower named titan arum, or Amorphophallus titanum, sounded too tempting to resist. I mean, what could be better than the scent of rotten flesh coming off a giant penis. Here’s what the almighty Wikipedia had to say on the subject:

The titan arum or Amorphophallus titanum (from Ancient Greek amorphos, “without form, misshapen” + phallos, “penis”, and titan, “giant”) is a flowering plant with the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world. (The largest single flower is borne by the Rafflesia arnoldii; the largest branched inflorescence in the plant kingdom belongs to the Talipot palm, Corypha umbraculifera). It thrives at the edges of rainforests near open grasslands. Though found in many botanic gardens around the world it is still indigenous only to the tropical forests of Sumatra. Due to its fragrance, which is reminiscent of the smell of a decomposing mammal, the titan arum is also known as a carrion flower, the “Corpse flower”, or “Corpse plant” (Indonesian: bunga bangkai – bunga means flower, while bangkai means corpse or cadaver; for the same reason, the same title is also attributed to Rafflesia which, like the titan arum, also grows in the rainforests of Sumatra).

The buzz of media flies was in the air. On Berkeley’s Botanical Garden webpage, on Facebook, even on Twitter. There were hourly updates on the plant’s growth, special graphs, news reports. “Maladora is opening! Garden open til 6 tonight,” one rapturous Twitter post announced. Maladora (the apt name given to this particular titan arum) would bloom and stink only for a day or two before returning to its non-pornographic dormant state. It could take years before its next sexual awakening, so we had to hurry up to witness the dirty miracle.

The next day Nick and I were on our way to the botanical garden up in the Berkeley hills. We couldn’t exactly smell out way to Maladora – the flower was supposedly encased somewhere in a glasshouse – but at every step there were secret and not-so-secret signs and arrows nudging us in the right direction. This was our Holy Flower quest… across the desert and through the mountain to Strawberry Canyon, to the Temple where the flower that – where the flower that holds the stink of a dead animal resides forever.

Now, being the dorky graduate students that we are, Nick and I engaged in some iconoclastic literary promiscuity.

Gather your titan arums while ye may, / Their stink is still a-flying. / And this same corpse that rots today / Tomorrow won’t be smelling.

This is the flower primeval…

And a more literal one: Stetson! / You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Is it possible that T.S. Eliot had in mind the titan arum?

And what about Victorian poetry? Surely, the Corpse Flower would be the perfect image. Were Victorian poets aware of it? After all, it was scientifically described in 1878. There’s a dissertation chapter in here. “Festering Beauty: Swinburne’s Amorphophallus titanum.”

Or Baudelaire? Les Fleurs du mal. True, the guy died in 1867, but come on, there must be some correspondences. “II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, / Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, /— Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants.”

Indulging in such literary fantasies, we finally reached our coveted destination. There, inside the glasshouse, in the hot, humid, rancid air, it towered in all its virulent virility, the titanic flower. A giant penis in a giant vagina. At last! If I died now, I’d die happy.

A small crowd had already gathered. There was a radio journalist, a TV crew. Two old ladies stood sentry next to the flower like curators in front of the Mona Lisa. “The flower is very rare,” one of them, wearing a peacock-patterned neck strap and a purple blouse matching some of the flower’s colors, patiently explained to the curious. “It grows only in Sumatra.” “Carrion-eating insects pollinate it,” the other, dressed in mournful black, told me. “When it flowers, it heats up to mammalian body temperature to lure in the beetles and flies.”

“Isn’t it difficult to stand that smell for a whole day?” I asked.

“Yes, it’s pretty hard,” said the black-clad lady. “It smells like my neighbor’s garbage can.”

“It smells like a dirty graduate student,” a person from the crowd piped in.

I sniffed my armpits. Did I really smell like carrion? I took a shower just yesterday.

Nick and I stood around for a while, marveling at the sheer weirdness of nature. Why does such a flower exist? To make men jealous? To provide material for dissertation chapters? O, Amorphophallus titanum, thou art sick!

On the way out we saw a donation jar with a label “Donate to feed the titan.” We dropped a dollar each and went out to get some fresh air.