World's BIGGEST Flowers! (World's Most Spectacular Plants episode 2 of 14)

at least a quarter of a million species of flowering plants have been discovered and named so far and within this bewildering diversity flowers come in all shapes colors and sizes but what are the very biggest flowers on earth this is the type or Tom Cory feh boom Dracula Farah this palm produces the largest flower scape in the world which can grow up to eight meters long and have literally millions of tiny flowers along its length well this is impressive the flowers are very small so I think we can do better in our search for the world's largest flowers there are many ways to classify blues some a single flowers that grow alone while others consist of lots of small flowers that together make up a unified floor of structure in terms of single flowers the biggest in the world belonged to the parasitic plants called rafflesia that grow in the rainforests of Asia I'm in West Sumatra Indonesia on the search for giant rafflesia blooms to the forest these amazing flowers were discovered 200 years ago but they flower so infrequently but they're still relatively little-known for the last week I've been sending guides and porters and all directions through the jungle try and look for developing flowers and to talk to villagers to see if there's any blooms open and so far every single one has come back negative however late last night's one contact came back and said there's a flower open in this forest and it's not just any rafflesia it's the biggest of all rafflesia arnoldii I the largest member of the genus and arguably the biggest flower on earth and it's in bloom just over here I have dreamt of seeing giant flower in the wall and yes for release it blooms have red and so not easy to find Wow look at this this is rafflesia arnoldii I'm the biggest single flower on earth and let's measure it it's about it's about 65 70 centimeters across they can get a little bigger thereafter known to be about 80 to 85 centimeters and some reports suggest even over a meter in diameter but still it's an amazing flower and it's meant to resemble a dead corpse but it has a rather disgusting secret rafflesia flowers mimic the rotting bodies of dead animals you can see it consists of five petals that are bright orange and warty this is meant to resemble carrion and inside it's got hairs like a dead corpse of some animal and if I smell it it's got a strong smell of rotting meat it's quite incredible this partner is an amazing life cycle it's actually a parasite it has no leaves it exists as a network of fibrous tissues within a vine called the tetra stigma vine and once in a while buds develop the buds develop over about nine months to a year and then suddenly burst open forming this incredible bloom but the bloom itself lasts for only about six to seven days then it dies and rots in exactly the same forests of Sumatra there grows another giant flower which is even harder to see than rafflesia this plant is called a morph a phallus titanum or the titan arum Lily the enormous flowers of this species are bigger than those of rafflesia but it's not a single flower rather it's made up of lots of little blooms like rafflesia the giant flowers of the titan arum also only last a few days then they wither and die so they're very difficult to see in the wild a friend in Sumatra let me know that this giant flower bud was about to open so I jumped on a plane and flew out to Sumatra as quickly as I could just like rafflesia the titan arum also uses smell as a mechanism to attract pollinators that these giant flowers evolved side by side is testimony to the power of scent as an attractant for in these dense rainforests visual signals like petals and not very effective where a scent can travel vast distances wafted on even the faintest jungle breezes I can honestly say I have waited my whole life to see this giant flower and bloom in the wild and I can hardly contain myself with excitement searching for it and that there it is the titan arum mini and it absolutely stinks I can already smell it from here let's go check it out Wow this is bigger than I ever imagined it took me a day or two to fly into Sumatra to reach this flower and sadly I think it was a little past its best the petals had already started to age and curved inwards but it was still very impressive the biggest one of these ever recorded stood 3.73 metres tall this specimen isn't quite that big but let's find out how big it is it's so big I can't even reach the top of it as an approximation about 3 metres tall this flower has a really complicated pollination mechanism and that partly explains the gigantic size of the structure inside there are two fans of male and female flowers the female flowers open a mature first and become receptive to pollen then they wither and die and then and only then the male flowers florets release their pollen because the femur ones have already withered and are no longer receptor the flower can't pollinate itself but this gigantic structure has the solution to that problem this bit here in the middle is called thus paddocks and it works just like a giant chimney it releases sense and if you smell it closely oh it absolutely stinks just like rotting meat or rotting fish and it's actually known locally here in Indonesia it's the corpse flower this chimney keeps up on its own and remove and sweat it up just like a chimney and that's extremely important because the nearest open flower like this but you kilometres away so it's crucial for the flower to get it sent far and wide to trap pollinators whilst observing this giant flower I could see this scent attraction mechanism working well lots and lots of flies were buzzing around the flower they've may have been attracted and flown from kilometers away from the nearest bloom to enable cross pollination the leaves of the titan arum are produced on just as an impressive scale as the flowers each leaf can be the size of a small tree and often last for a year or more slowly filtering energy from sunlight in storing it in the enormous underground tuber a single titan arum plant may wait several years before it is stored up enough energy to produce another gigantic bloom almost unbelievably these diverse rain forests on the island of Sumatra a home to a third much less well known giant flower called Amorphophallus gigas a friend called Brad Wilson was lucky enough to see one of these giant flowers in the wild the blooms can be as tall as a lamppost but are even rarer than refugium and titan arum and they're even less predictable in terms of when they may flower sadly I was not lucky enough to see an open bloom in the world but a friend on the island of Java kindly let me know when one was about to bloom in this garden and this this is it Amorphophallus gigas this is the tallest flower of the entire Aran family down here from the base all the way up this gigantic scale this flower stands at over three meters tall but in the world plants with flowers over five meters have actually been recorded Amorphophallus Geass works exactly like the titan arum as a chimney but here the greater height allows the flower to distribute its scent even more efficient and just like the titan arum i saw plenty of flies attracted to the bloom believe it or not both the titan arum and Amorphophallus gigas can be grown at home although you'll need a very large pot and a very large growing space with warm temperatures and high humidity but both species can be brought to flower in captivity en si Capitan II recently flowered a titan arum at his nursery Paradiso in Australia this is my multiple titanium we call in tiny the titan he became famous in december 2016 when he produced a flower bud that grew to 1.8 metres tall and 1.1 meters wide he became an internet sensation every TV station came to view him and thousands of people came through over a three-day period understandably though the very biggest flowers in the world might not be suitable for everybody the titan arum has a smaller relative that's really fun and easy to grow at home there's one just over here this is a more for phallus Cognac also known as devil's tongue because of this large point Hispanics in the middle sent to resemble the tongue of a devil or a monster this plant is actually really easy to grow at home all it needs is a large pot to grow it in and it means well-trained substrate and ideally a location where it's not exposed to direct sunlight it likes a bit of shade and really surprisingly it can even be grown outside in the UK it can survive light thrusts a bit of snow providing that the corn is deep down enough in the ground not to freeze solid it's very interesting because it doesn't even need a pot in order to flower it flowers when the corn is like this when it flowers the flower will then die then the corn will produce roots and then it'll produce a single massive leaf for the season it will take a few years for your plant to get large enough to flower but it's well worth it [Music] you you

Channel: Redfern Natural History Productions

Views: 4,683,394

Rating: 4.8459644 out of 5

Keywords: flower, biggest, biggest flower, big, large, largest, largest flower, large flower, big flower, Amorphophallus, Amorphophallus titanum, titanum, titan, gigas, Amorphophallus gigas, Rafflesia arnoldii, Rafflesia, arnoldii, amorphophallus konjac, konjac, giant, giant flowers, World Most Spectacular Plants, Spectacular Plants, www.spectacularplants.com, World's Most Spectacular Plants

Id: D9635AJSvZk

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Taymerica]

Narrator seems drunk or suffering from decent allergic reactions the whole time.

[u/fangball]

Stewart McPherson is the man. His book ‘Britain’s Treasure Islands’ is absolutely fantastic. I was lucky enough to see the first flower Rafflesia arnoldii in bloom in the wild near Bukkitinggi seven years ago. Once in a lifetime experience probably, could never have happened without the amazing guide my friend and I met in a random market. We didn’t seek the flower, but our guide had discovered a patch of the plants when he was a young kid and likes to check if they’re in bloom when he’s in the area we were backpacking. We saw all three stages of the flower in that patch, and indeed smells bad in bloom. Petals were thick and meaty like a pork chop

[u/b1arge]

The host is the Steve Irwin of plants! "It absolutely stinks, I can already smell it from here. LET'S GO CHECK IT OUT!"

[u/sp4ce]

Pretty cool.

[u/Exothermos]

Is this a Botany show? British TV has such interesting documentaries. I mean, I didn’t even see a single scruffy woodsman yelling about nothing, which is what passes for educational content here in America.

[u/gsjameson]

Jungle attire: business casual.

[u/TheRogueToad]

I feel like TGRI is responsible for this.

[u/gellmania]

I thought that flower was going to bite that guy's head off for sure.

[u/vectran]

Your mamma...