Titan Arum Now … And 125 Years Ago

Have you seen the spectacular, rare Titan Arum plant (Amorphophallus titanium) now blooming in the Cornell School of Integrative Plant Science’s botanical collection?  The very first time a Titan Arum bloomed as a cultivated greenhouse plant was 125 years ago, in the famed Kew Botanical Gardens of London.  A fabulous account of that historic bloom appeared in the 1891 issue of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, a copy of which is housed in Mann Library’s special collections vault. We put a spotlight on this work in celebration of Cornell’s own blooming Titan. 

The Titan Arum bloom of 1889 grew from seeds collected by Italian naturalist Odoardo Beccari from the forests of Sumatra in Southeast Asia.Curtis’s Botanical Magazine devoted over seven pages to recounting Beccari’s encounter with this exquisitely remarkable plant and its growth in the Kew Gardens collection.  Three illustrations accompany the description, showing the plant in three different stages of development.  Matilda Smith—who earned the distinction of becoming the Kew Garden’s first official botanic artist—was  the artwork’s creator, lauded for both her artistry and perseverance in suffering the strong smell of “rotting fish and burnt sugar” emitted by the Titan Arum during its blooming phase.

The Titan Arum plant is very difficult to cultivate successfully. Native to the hilly rainforests of Sumatra in Indonesia, it faces an uncertain future in the wild due to the destruction of its wild forest habitat. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the plant’s conservation status as vulnerable. In Indonesia, the Bogor Botanic Gardens and the Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney, Australia have collaborated to develop a conservation strategy to maintain this rainforest giant’s presence in the Sumatran rainforest biome. Greenhouse efforts like those here at Cornell as well as the documentation of the Titan Arum that is preserved in library collections—such as the Curtis’s Botanical Magazineaccount on display here—are also helping to keep this beauty a living part of the world’s biodiversity heritage. 

A reproduction of the full account of the 1889 Titan Arum bloom published by Curtis’s Botanical Magazine is available online via the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Cornell University Library is an active member of the BHL consortium, contributing rare volumes from Mann’s special collections in entomology, botany and other life sciences to BHL’s online collection

About Curtis’s Botanical Magazine: Curtis’s Botanical Magazine is the world’s oldest continuously published illustrated journal. The magazine’s founder was William Curtis (1746-1799), who was originally trained as an apothecary but early in his career turned to the study of natural history and botany as his true calling. Curtis was known as a prolific yet somewhat unreliable innovator who often started ambitious projects without bringing them to completion. By founding the Botanical Magazine, however, he made an enormous and lasting impact on the field of botany. Over the two centuries of its existence the journal has introduced plants from all over the world to European botanists and gardeners, kindled renewed interest in already known plants, and informed changing trends in popular gardening tastes. Art lovers have long treasured Curtis’s Botanical Magazine for its vibrant color plates, created by some of the most prominent artists of England. In the journal’s early years, its botanical images were hand-colored engravings of original drawings.