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The pillar.

Legacy, by Michael Matsumoto.

Hold your breath, everyone:

A rotten stench has been wafting through a greenhouse at the Denver Botanic Gardens—and visitors are all too eager to breathe it in. Who knows if they’ll ever get a second chance?

The odiferous offender is a plant native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra and known commonly as the “corpse flower,” for reasons that are pungently apparent when it starts blooming. At that point, it becomes a botanical stink bomb, emitting a noisome odor evolved to attract certain beetles and flies, which unwittingly spread the plant’s pollen. All told, the blooming process can take about 36 hours and won’t happen again for years—if ever.

“It’s something that is potentially a once in a lifetime opportunity to see,” says Nick Snakenberg, curator of tropical plants at the Denver Botanic Gardens. “We made the mistake of saying it might bloom on [August] 16th, and we had people lined up at the gate.” The garden has several corpse flowers, but this is its debut bloom. The process started on Tuesday evening.

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