- Author: Lowell Cooper
I just returned from a several week trip to Borneo, which is located in the South China Sea, in Southeast Asia near the Phillipines. So you know it is far away. It is very hot and wet and humid, so as you can imagine if you stand in one place for a while you are bound to throw down roots. The place is very green and I was looking forward to enjoying the plants, which are quite plentiful. As an aside, it seemed to me that a huge percent of the houseplants we enjoy are from Borneo; more accurately from Indonesia. Since my wife and I were on a nature quest, mainly animals, we had guides who were quite familiar with plants also and mentioned that we should see a rafflesia – the largest flower in the world.
How to find a venue for viewing this plant was not as easy as I thought. They flower at different times so there is some luck in finding a plant at just the time we were there. The flower only lasts 5-6 days, so timing is everything. We didn't have the time to just go to a garden and sit and wait. But we were lucky. Driving a road with another destination entirely, we saw a hand-written sign nailed to a post that said “rafflesia in bloom”. It was in front of a roadside snack stand that sold cold sodas and some snacks. There was no parking lot, clearly not a tourist mecca, but merely a road pull-off to someone's kiosk and possibly their home, though that was not visible. The viewing had a price – the equivalent of a couple of dollars.
According to Wikipedia, Rafflesia arnoldi is commonly called the corpse lily
because it is parasitic and smells of decay. It is in the Rafflesia genus and Rafflesiaceae family. Forgive the technical diversion.
We paid the toll and were led up a somewhat muddy path single file to a fenced-in area which hardly deserves to be called a garden. It had only one plant. It seems that the Rafflesia had its own home and was protected from animals by a rather flimsy fence so the pet dog couldn't accidentally destroy an important source of family wealth, and we were also expected to obey the boundary of this garden plot. There in the middle was a flower so large that I did a double-take. I really had to stare at it for a few seconds for it to register that this plant, about a yard in diameter and growing on the ground was actually the flower. It seems that the flower is so heavy that it hugs the ground and comes behind other flowers that have passed their prime. The weight of it alone makes it understandable that it would grow like a ground vine. Even though its common names is “corpse flower” because it smells bad, I didn't get a whiff of it. It seems that it has a center pitcher where it does a lot of its digestion of insects.
Borneo is jammed with incredible plants. Because of its size, Rafflesia is impossible to forget and given the profusion of wildlife, Borneo is a paradise of flora and fauna to delight and surprise the visitor. I recommend it.