• Question: what's the biggest flower you've ever seen? would you like to see the Rafflesia? i would how long does it take the Rafflesia to grow

    Asked by wookiee to Amelia, Clem, Izzy, Sarah on 17 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      The Rafflesia is indeed huge! I think these are indeed the biggest flowers – although I’m not sure I’d like to go and see them because of the smell – they are sometimes called the corpse flower as they smell like rotting meat to attract flies, sounds pretty gross! I think they take several months to grow, which is pretty fast compared with how many years it takes us to grow!

      I think the biggest flowers I’ve seen in person are some sunflowers as they can get pretty big if grown well! (Not the ones I’ve attempted to grow which usually get eaten by slugs…)

    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      Sarah’s right – Rafflesia take several months to grow – which is quick compared to us, but slow compared to other plants like roses! Even though they take months to grow, they only flower for 5-7 days. I’d love to see them (despite the smell…) but I think it would be pretty hard to find one in flower!!
      Rafflesia is quite a cool plant – it has no stem, leaves or roots – just the flower. It is a parasite – it grows completely inside a type of vine, and then bursts out when it is ready to flower, after stealing lots of the vine’s food and water first.

      I don’t know what the biggest individual flower I’ve seen is (I’ve seen a lot of flowers in my time…), although one really cool one is the jade plant. A vine hangs down from the ceiling with lots of flowers coming off it – making one massive hanging collection of flowers. It is also a really nice blue colour.

      A fun fact is that flowers like sunflowers and daisies are actually made up of lots of little flowers too. Each little yellow bit in the middle of a daisy is a single flower – and the petals each come from one of the outside yellow flowers – and a signal in the plant tells them to grow one big white petal. We call the daisy as a whole an ‘inflorescence’.

    • Photo: Clemence Bonnot

      Clemence Bonnot answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      I think the biggest flower I’ve seen was at the Kew garden in london and was a flower of the giant water lily (Victoria water lily).
      Small flower takes usually less time to grow than bigger flower (they require more energy to the plant…)
      i would probably love to see the rafflesia flower myself, not sure any botanical garden grow them because of the smell… and of the difficulty to cultivate it. Indeed parasitic plants are more difficult then other to grow. This is due to the fact they are particularly well adapted to their host and to the environment their host leaves in. Changing the way the host grow or trying to grow them without the host is particularly difficult (not impossible but difficult).

    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      I would absolutely love to see the Rafflesia I think they are fascinating!! Not only is it a huge flower but it has no real stems, roots or leaves, and is completely parasitic. It is also super clever to attract flies to pollinate you by smelling of rotten flesh! It takes up to around 9 months for the Rafflesia to grow.

      I have actually seen a similar flower called the Corpse Flower when I visited the Eden Project in Cornwall. This is a rainforest plant and I think it is the world’s biggest flowering plant at around 3 meters tall. Like the Rafflesia it also stinks like rotting flesh – although it hadn’t started smelling yet when I visited (luckily!) as this only happens later in life. This plant is so big it has to grow for 6 YEARS before it flowers!

      I think the biggest flower I have ever grown is indeed a sunflower. Me and my sisters always used to have a competition who could grow the tallest one when we were younger. I once grew one twice as large as me!

Comments