smell the flowers

Date

I love flowers. Thankfully, my house is surrounded by beautiful native and not-so native plants. I give you: Flowers of the ABC House.

These flowers are such an intense red that my camera couldn’t handle it!

And finally, my favorite: this is some sort of tropical voodoo lily variety (really- that’s what they’re called!) or its more Americanized cousin, Dracontium. In any case, it’s a weird looking flower that smells like rotting meat and attracts flies and other insects. The insects then drown in nectar at the base of the flower and are digested by this carnivorous plant. The purple flowers are about 9″ tall and they haven’t bloomed at the house since before I moved in; apparently past housemates hated the stench. However, I consider myself pretty lucky that I got to take a whiff of one of these beauties in person. They were only in full bloom for a couple weeks. Yes, this is your reward for making it all the way to the bottom of this post. And you thought it was going to be boring.

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