Vaseline at the ready
It's beginning to bloom! On the scene for Lois the corpse flower's big day
Much ado about a bloom — crowds pack in to see Lois the corpse flower, though itstill hasnt bloomed.Photo by Caroline Gallay
In front of the flower, looking out at the butterflies.Photo by Caroline Gallay
Lois has finally made her move. The corpse flower — Houston's hottest celebrity — is beginning to bloom at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, providing some (very slow) thrills to her fans.
The blooming process is expected to take four to six hours, once it's confirmed. While the museum called it the start of a bloom (in the words of their own tweet, "very early stages"), there are no noticeable signs (to a non-plant expert) at the moment. No petals have opened yet.
And there's still a chance it could be deemed a false alarm. Natural Science Museum media liaisons on the scene are urging caution, despite the museum's own blooming tweet. The bloom will be confirmed once the purple begins to show.
None of this caution has stopped the long line from multiplying in the lobby.
Early risers and night owls might have been able to walk right in to the Cockrell Butterfly Center, but by mid-morning the line stretched down the corridor. Now ... well, you'll be waiting.
Oh, the drama a celebrity brings — in this case a plant phenom named Amorphophallus Titanum, commonly known as the corpse flower and in this case nicknamed Lois. Corpse flowers are so rare that Lois will be only the 29th to bloom in the United States in the past 80 years.
The early crowd was a mixture of kids on field trips and in YMCA T-shirts who gaped at the flower for a few seconds before running off to investigate the insects, hipsters intrigued by non-traditional flora and press members waiting for a bloom to further the media frenzy that's erupted around the flower. (Yes, folks, that's Houston in July for you.)
Lois is camped out in a tiny annex between the official butterfly sanctuary and the educational area. There's a slightly foul, musty odor in the air, but it's hard to tell where no air conditioning and cramped body odor ends and the flower soon to smell like rotting flesh begins.
In preparation for the corpse flower bloom — which has been anxiously awaited since Friday — the Houston Museum of Natural Science has started staying open 24 hours a day.
According to HMNS horticulturalist Zac Stayton, there is Vaseline at the ready at the exhibit entrance — to be placed under each nostril like one would use in a coroner's office — in case the stink is intolerable to guests. As of right now, Stayton is the only one with a clear idea of the smell, getting his nose right up at the purple-tinged leaf tips and reporting an odor like "musty rotting vegetables."
Sure, a stinky six-foot-tall flower makes for an unorthodox celeb, but we'll take Lois — blooming or not — over Heidi and Spencer any day.
