Rumor Has It: Wednesday's The Day
- Vero Minute
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
McKee Botanical Garden has a signature mood. Cultivated calm. Stone paths. Serene ponds. Last weekend, crowds materialized for the annual Waterlily Celebration, blossoms floating in glassy perfection, everyone behaving themselves.
That era is over...at least for the next few days.
Meet Princess Pungent. She arrived at McKee just last month, in May, as an unremarkable two-inch spike. She has since been growing nine inches in a single day. She is currently an imposing alien green column, and she has absolutely no interest in McKee's reputation.
Most "corpse flowers" spend seven to ten years underground storing energy before producing their first bloom. Princess Pungent has done that work.
And rumor has it Wednesday is the day she finally collects.
When the frilly outer skirt peels back to reveal what can only be described as a velvety raw-meat interior, the central spike will heat itself to human body temperature and ventilate the surrounding air with a concentrated blasting odor resembling rotting flesh, sweaty socks, and rancid garbage.
Morbid curiosity is one of the most honest impulses we humans have. We slow down for car accidents. We Google things we know will disturb us. We pay good money to be frightened in dark rooms.
Princess Pungent is simply the botanical version of all that, a living, reeking, once-in-years spectacle that demands to be witnessed precisely because it is so magnificently wrong.
There is real joy in standing before something that smells like a crime scene and realizing everyone around you is grimacing in exactly the same way. Strangers bonding over collective disgust. It is, genuinely, a beautiful thing.
The waterlilies were lovely. Princess Pungent does not care about lovely.
You have 24 to 48 hours once she opens before she collapses and goes dark for years.
Wednesday may be your moment. Plug your nose and go!
The garden is open Tuesday - Sunday, 10 AM to 5 PM. For more information and updates real time updates on the expected bloom, click here.
