Thousands have waited hours to catch a glimpse of the bloom of a corpse flower at Sydney's Botanic Gardens. The plant is drawing in crowds for both its rarity – it last bloomed 15 years ago – and its pungent stench.
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00:00It's a reception worthy of a celebrity.
00:03Crowds waiting hours to catch a glimpse of the rare bloom of this corpse flower at Sydney's Botanic Gardens.
00:09This spectacle a long time coming.
00:12The endangered Amaphor fafarlis titanum only flowers once every few years, and only for 24 hours.
00:20This is the first time her bloom has graced Sydney since 2010.
00:24Nicknamed Patricia, she's drawn over 20,000 people to marvel at both her striking appearance and her stench.
00:32It smells a little bit like when there's a dead animal in the house, but you don't know where it is or what it is.
00:38It's kind of that smell, like a musty dead type of smell.
00:41The flower is beautiful. The smell was like hot garbage.
00:45Roses would be ideal, wouldn't it? No, clearly a dead body.
00:48The pungent smell, mimicking its home in the jungle of Indonesia's Sumatra, to attract pollinators.
00:55It will take two to three hours to completely unfurl, when she will reach a temperature of up to 37 degrees Celsius to intensify her scent.
01:04Patricia showed signs she would bloom just over two weeks ago. Since then, she's grown 1.6 meters.
01:11With only 300 estimated to be left in the wild, workers at Sydney's Botanic Gardens are set to hand-pollinate the flower to produce a seed for the species' survival.
01:20Once it all dies down, we'll harvest that seed and we'll be able to use it and share it with other botanic gardens to grow more of these plants.
01:28Patricia has also become a social media sensation, drawing admirers from across the globe.
01:34Almost a million people have followed the corpse flower's journey to bloom on a livestream titled A Plant to Die For.
01:41Her following coining new acronyms in her honour, including WWTF, We Worship the Flower, and BBTB, Blessed Be the Bloom.
01:51I've been watching Patricia for a week on the livestream non-stop, while I'm working.
01:57I hope my boss has been watching this. Just on the livestream on the side, waiting for her to pop open.
02:01And I saw her today and I was like, I've got to get into the city. I was at home. I was like, get on the train, I'm going to see her.
02:06Her popularity, scientists say, is great for awareness around conservation efforts.
02:11It's really rewarding to us to see that there is an interest when you have a spectacular plant like this for people to come in, to people to be engaged.
02:22It's really rewarding and we try to talk about the stories around amazing evolutionary adaptations, the importance of conserving threatened species like this so that they don't go extinct in the wild.
02:35The Botanic Gardens will open their gates until midnight to allow as many people as possible to revel at the corpse flower's bloom.
02:42A rarity that may not be seen here again for another decade.
02:47Justin Wu and Rosie Greninger for Taiwan Plus.