We're out of the office, but I wanted to send you this postcard. I'm at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

It is packed in here. There's a line hundreds of people long waiting to get in.

Again, this is a botanic garden.

And the room I'm in is the center of it all.

It's a kind of crowded greenhouse.

And we are all surrounding the corpse flower.

Imagine like a tulip bud big enough to play professional basketball.

It's six feet tall and all week long they've been anticipating that it's going to bloom

which would be the first time this has happened for this plant and it's 12 years old.

Here's Greg. I'm Greg Mueller. I'm Chief

scientist and Vice President for Science here at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

So what was supposed to happen was that the after these 12 years the flower was supposed to come up and and then what

so what would have happened is that space would have opened up on its own so the

spaith the thing he's describing,

is basically like this cabbage leaf looking thing

that surrounds the giant shaft of this plant.

And when that happens, it's associated with the plant heats up and it

volatizes this odor that smells like rotting meat, which attracts the

carrion feeders which come in and that's timed with when the

flower the female flowers are ready to be pollinated so this one was finally

ready but then something happened and it didn't.

So now it'll basically die back.

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