Sauromatum on the wiki and in the garden
Jim McKenney (Thu, 09 Jun 2005 15:00:36 PDT)

I've added two images of Sauromatum guttatum (aka S. venosum) to the wiki.
Take a look at:

<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…

These are blooming now and are totally disgusting!

The newly opened spathe is really interesting, even beautiful and colorful.
The long gently curving spadix gives the inflorescence a graceful quality.
But the stench!!!!! Other malodorous aroids smell of carrion. This one
reeks of fresh, warm rat feces. It's amazing to me how pervasive this
stench is in the garden. I noticed it the other day while working on the
other side of the house the offending plants were fifty or sixty feet
away. The flies noticed it, too: they are all over it. Later in the year
I'll post photos of the foliage (decorative and tropical) and, if they
appear, the interesting fruits. These fruits look a bit like pomegranates.

Here.s a Sauromatum story which I hope I have not posted before. Years ago,
a female rat got into the house and raised a family before we realized what
was going on. When I found the nest, the smell was awful. The rats would
not touch baited traps, so I resorted to Warfarin. It worked. Within a
week, the nauseating stench of dead rat emanated from crevices deep within
the house. The experience, one I hope never to repeat, made a deeply
offensive impression on me.

Now fast forward several years. Im in the storage area of the basement
cleaning in late winter. I catch a whiff of something disturbingly
familiar: it's the rat smell again, not the smell of dead rat, which is bad
enough but at least carries the consolation that it announces the end of a
problem, but live rat, live rat with a healthy digestive tract and
evidently eating very well indeed. With growing senses of dread and
apprehension I begin to sniff around and try to find the source of the
smell. I go for the obvious places: behind bookcases, near faucets, deep in
ground level closets. I'm not finding anything. not even traces of rat
activity. It's not making sense: the smell is not coming from the places
where you would expect to find a rat. I twitch my nose a few times, and it
seems to indicate a nearby shelf. I stare towards the apparent source of
the smell, and suddenly there it is, a rat tail hanging out of a tangle of
stored items. I plan my attack.

But wait a minute: the rat tail is not moving at all. The rat tail does not
seem to have any hair on it. The rat tail is not a rat tail, it's the
spadix of a Sauromatum which had been stored on the shelf.

The spadix was promptly snapped off (the spadix is the source of the
stench) and thrown out into the winter garden. The rest of the plant was
brought out and spent the rest of the week prompting numerous re-tellings
of the latest ratstory.

Jim McKenney

jimmckenney@starpower.net

Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, where the Sauromatum are
giving the Dracunculus a run for the distinction of being the grossest
plant in the garden this week.