Officials at Southwestern College in Winfield said more than 1,500 people traveled to the campus for the chance to see and smell a titan arum.
The titan arum is famed for its size, rarity and smell. The rotten smell it unleashes as it blooms has earned the plant the name "corpse flower."
Fans of Southwestern College's titan arum, called "Jinx," have been on high alert since early last week when changes to the plant signaled a potential bloom.
Charles Osen, a spokesperson for the college, said that a YouTube livestream set up of the plant had more than 4,500 as of Friday — two days before the plant began to bloom.
The grand display came Sunday afternoon, when the plant's cluster of flowers began to unfurl and reveal their deep magenta tone.
Crowds were on hand early Monday to see the flower and take a whiff of its accompanying smell.
Hundreds of people passed by retired biologist and outgoing greenhouse director, Max Thompson. Thompson said he built the greenhouse with his students in the 1970s. He was gifted the college's first corpse flower corm, or tuber, in 2001, after helping the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida, with some floricultural work.
Thompson and incoming greenhouse director Bryon Rinke nurtured the plant for years before it had its first bloom in 2014.
In 2019, it split into three, leaving the college with three corpse flowers. One was sold to a plant enthusiast in North Carolina. The second offshoot grew into the plant garnering so much attention this week.
Thompson said both flowers have been known to leave quite an impression.
"Last time it bloomed, in 2020, we had a group of firemen come down and look at it from the fire station," Thompson said. "One of them smelled it, walked out, and vomited....He said he would not be coming (to look) at this one."
The bloom is notoriously short-lived. The plant started blossoming on Sunday and had begun to wither by Monday afternoon.
