ORIGIN: https://www.yourweather.co.uk/news/
A gigantic flower that smells like rotting flesh lives hidden inside a vine and appears only briefly. A strange jewel of Southeast Asia that has baffled botanists trying to understand and reproduce it before it disappears.
Rafflesia peeks out among the vines of Southeast Asia as a red, colossal rarity. Credit: Frans Lanting, Nat Geo Image Collection Some rainforests harbor presences that seem designed by a Stranger Things screenwriter. In the heart of the Southeast Asian jungle, where the air is humid and light filters through lianas, a gigantic flower opens—blood-red and with an odor so fetid it would scare off even a hungry fox.
It is called Rafflesia, and it astonishes because it can measure more than one meter in diameter and weigh about nine kilograms. It is, quite literally, the largest flower in the world—and also one of the most mysterious. B
eyond its incredible size, this flower has no stem, no leaves, and no roots. It lives attached to the inner tissues of a vine from the genus Tetrastigma, which it completely parasitizes.
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