Beauty and the beast(ly stink)

For a week or so I've been visiting the konjac (or voodoo lily or devil's tongue or, according to Wikipedia, elephant yam, so named because of its massive edible corm) down in the science complex, watching each day as the blossom spreads its beauty and its concomitant stink, until one of my colleagues in the sciences suggested that if I like the lily so much, maybe I'd like to move it to my office and live with that stink all day long.

The stink is not as strong as I'd expected, although it does tend to hit you in the face when you walk into that end of the building, especially after the building's been shut tight all night long. I may not be the best person to pronounce judgment on the odor since my nose is pretty stuffed up right now, but it's a mild rotten-meat smell, no worse than what you sometimes smell on a bad day in the grocery store. It's a nice stink to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

I have learned that that big curvy outer sheath is called a spathe and the long spikey center is called a spadix, but I don't know what to call the color of the spathe, which ranges from deep purple to magenta to greenish-black depending on how you look at it. And it turns out that the spathe provides cover for the tiny stamens and pistils located at the base of the spadix, in an area the color and texture of an ear of corn. (I kept trying to get up high enough to take a photo looking down into the blossom, but the chairs down there are pretty rickety and I didn't think it was worth breaking my neck over a flower.)

My colleague who serves as Keeper of the Konjac says the blossom has reached its peak and will soon start to wither, so I suppose I'll soon start parking back on my end of campus instead of walking through the science buildings twice a day. It was nice while it lasted--more than nice, in fact: it was beautiful. It is beautiful. It remains beautiful even as it reeks of mortality, and that, I think, is a goal I can get behind.