Want to smell a corpse flower?

It’s blooming. And it smells like death. Meet the corpse flower, or Amorphophallus Titanum, which is in bloom for a limited time at the Foster Botanical Garden.

“It kind of smells like if you have a dead mouse in your house and you can’t find it, or the cat brought in the gecko, and it's underneath of the couch, and it starts stinking,” Rob Hausmann, the horticulture curator for Honolulu Botanical Gardens, told Aloha State Daily. “There are also notes of Limburger cheese and sweaty gym bag, and maybe some — I think I'm the only one that smells this — but burnt rubber. It is not a nice smell. Definitely rotting. Rotting meat. Rotting fish, that would probably be accurate, as well.”

The bloom started to unfurl yesterday afternoon and it won’t last long, Hausmann said.

“If you Google it, it says 24 to 48 hours, but we've noticed here in Hawaiʻi — whether it be the humidity or whatnot — they last about 24 hours,” he said. “I think it'll be completely folded back up by tomorrow afternoon.”

Foster Botanical Garden is one of five botanical gardens on Oʻahu, which is part of the Honolulu Botanical Gardens, run by the City and County of Honolulu. Together, these gardens include 650 acres and have a plant collection that is used for research, education and conservation.

In April, Foster Botanical Garden was home to another corpse flower bloom, which people named Stink-182.

Each plant needs to grow for about eight to 10 years before it is mature enough to start blooming. Exactly when each plant blooms can be hard to predict.

“That's what makes this so rare,” Hausmann said. “With Poinsettias, you can change the environmental conditions and trick them into flowering by giving them a certain food regimen and giving them a certain number of hours of daylight. With this, we can't do that.”

The plant is native to the tropical rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia, according to the United States Botanic Garden.

“Hawaiʻi does give really favorable conditions to its native environment, Sumantra,” Hausmann said. “I think that's why this garden has had 27 of them bloom altogether. I don't know that any other botanical garden can say that. And this one specifically that's blooming right now, has bloomed five other times. This is the sixth time that it has bloomed.”

The smell is already starting to recede, he added. But if it closes, there are plenty of rare, smelly plants for visitors to check out.

“It's worth mentioning that there are a lot of other really cool, rare flowers,” Hausmann said. “Even more rare than the Amorphousphallus [Titanum] is the Gigasiphon Tree that is in full bloom. It's native to Kenya. There are hardly any left in the wild. Probably the largest one in cultivation is here at this garden. And then there are black bat flowers in the conservatory. There are an array of orchids in bloom right now. The skunk tree is flowering, and it stinks. So, if somebody is wanting to find that stinky smell, they could find it over there, if they go seek out the skunk tree. Napoleon's Hat tree is flowering right now, and it smells really nice, kind of like cheesecake. There are other scents to enjoy at the garden, if they come later in the week, and they don't get to smell the corpse flower — which is truly not a very nice smell to begin with.”

Parking is limited, so carpools and public transportation are encouraged. Admission is $3 for kamaʻāina, Youth between the ages of six and 12 years old can enter for $1. Keiki who are five years old or younger can attend free. Details.

For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up here for our free Daily Edition newsletter.

Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.