Cambridge orchid in bloom smells like rotting cabbage

Visitors to a university garden can treat their nostrils to the heady scent of “rotting cabbages or decomposing dead rats” as a “rare” orchid blooms.

Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis is emitting its delightful aroma at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden.

The plant, from Asia, flowers every three to four years but “it’s very rare to see it in flower outside its natural habitat”, the university garden said.

The “total stinker” is irresistible to carrion flies which pollinate it.

Posting about the orchid on Facebook, and inviting visitors to sample the nasal nasty, the garden wrote: “You’ll know you’re getting close when you start to smell the delicate aroma of rotting cabbages.

“The odour has also been described as smelling like ‘dead rats decomposing next to rotting fish’.

“To the carrion flies and beetles that pollinate it in the wild, it smells amazing.”

The aroma comes from “mimicking something that is rotting, and it is doing that to attract carrion flies, which are insects that feed on rotting meat and vegetables”, the garden said.

The Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis is an epiphyte – a plant that grows on another plant but gets its own nutrients from the surrounding air and rainwater.

Volunteer Phil Gould, who has been tending the orchid, said it holds a “malodorous fascination” for him.

And they do not yet think it has reached its “ponging peak”, but said that should be “any time soon”.

The botanic garden is no stranger to smelly plants. Its Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) plant, with an aroma akin to rotting flesh, attracted hoards of visitors when it bloomed in 2004, 2015 and 2017.

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