I missed last week, so this week’s is a biggun, to make up for my tardiness.
Bow down before The Shapeless Cock-of-the-Gods:
Apparently, when this plant was filmed for The Private Life of Plants in 1995, David Attenborough decided to invent the term “titan arum” to avoid using the plant’s Latin (well, Greek, really) name on prime-time BBC-1:Amorphophallus titanum
- ἄμορφος (amorphos) = without form, shapeless
- φαλλός (phallos) = phallus, penis, cock
- Τιτάν (Titan) = primaeval Greek god
Coming from Croydon, euphemism has never been my strong point. The titan arum will always be the shapeless cock-of-the-gods to me.
Interestingly, the closest British relative of the cock-of-the-gods is lords-and-ladies, otherwise known as the cuckoo-pint. The “pint” here does not refer to the unit of volume, but is a contraction of the Old English word pintle, which also means phallus, penis or cock. There’s evidently something about the flowers of arum lilies that brings out the grubby little school-boy in taxonomists.
The cock-of-the-gods often gets touted as the largest flower in the world. This is technically untrue: the largest flower in the word is that of the parasitic em>Rafflesia:
![Rafflesia arnoldii [CC-BY-2.0 ma_suska@Wikipedia] Rafflesia arnoldii [CC-BY-2.0 ma_suska@Wikipedia]](http://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/rafflesia_arnoldii-225x300.jpg)
Rafflesia arnoldii [CC-BY-2.0 ma_suska@Wikipedia] Two things this plant shares with the cock-of-the-gods are its home (Sumatra) and its foul odour: both are pollinated by flies attracted by an odour mimicking rotting carrion
![Unidentified aroid [CC-BY-SA-3.0 Steve Cook]](http://www.polypompholyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/aroid-225x300.jpg)
Some arum lily or other. You can see the tiny unopened flowers on the surface of the spadix: they’re packed together so tightly they are squished into hexagons.