Rafflesia

The biggest flower in the world — and the smelliest

Rafflesia is the biggest flower in the world: 1 metre wide and 10 kg heavy! But it smells like... rotting meat. Why? To attract flies — they pollinate the flower. Rafflesia has no leaves, no stem and no roots — it hides inside another plant and only appears when it blooms.

Rafflesia arnoldii is the largest single flower in the world, up to 1 m across and 11 kg, growing in the rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo. It is a total parasite: it has no chlorophyll, lives as threads inside the Tetrastigma vine and feeds on it; only the flower is visible outside. The bud develops for 9 months, but the flower lasts just 5–7 days. Its rotting-meat smell and colour fool flies into pollinating it. It cannot be cultivated — only found in the wild — and is threatened by deforestation. It was described in 1818 in Sumatra by Stamford Raffles and Joseph Arnold.

Fun facts

• A rafflesia flower takes 9 months to form and lives just one week.
• It has no leaves, stem or roots — only a flower!
• It smells so bad that locals call it the 'corpse flower'.