Over at Roseville High School, something stinks — and it's got the whole community buzzing. The school is celebrating the rare bloom of its infamous corpse flower, marking yet another horticultural milestone. According to an official school Facebook post, the school became the first high school in the United States to witness a corpse flower bloom.
This isn't your typical school garden variety event. The Think Green Club at Roseville High has nurtured this particular specimen to its pungent glory. Noted for its towering height and the distinctive odor that gives it its name, the corpse flower — or Amorphophallus titanum — is a rarity that operates on its own blooming schedule, spending years as a wallflower before stealing the show.
KCRA reports that this marks the second bloom for Roseville High School's corpse flower, with the previous one in 2021 turning heads for both its look and scent. Gagandeep Singh, a member of the Think Green Club, told KCRA, "It makes me want to embrace learning about plants a lot more." Meanwhile, Bryan Nguyen, another club member, had a less favorable reaction: "It smells horrible, I nearly threw up."
The plant’s care falls under the stewardship of Jeffrey Underwood, club advisor and the science department coordinator. He's cited for the plant's success in achieving a full bloom. "They're actually not that easy to get to bloom fully. They take a lot of care," Underwood said in a statement obtained by KCRA. "This is actually a successful bloom for us and we've actually had a little trouble in the past getting them to fully open. But we were able to try some things with the light at night and it allowed us to get it to open."
To grasp the rarity of this botanical phenomenon, consider this: The United States Botanic Garden has documented only 147 corpse flower blooms in the U.S. since 1937, as noted by ABC10. The endangered species, native to Sumatra and sporting fewer than 1,000 in the wild, blooms infrequently — generally seven to 10 years for the initial display, followed by every four to six years for subsequent encores.
