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The world’s largest flower is also its ugliest

Known as ‘corpse flower’, the sinister Rafflesia resembles slabs of bloody, white-flecked meat, emits the scent of rotting flesh and eventually subsides into a mass of black slime

30 March 2024

9:00 AM

30 March 2024

9:00 AM

Pathless Forest: The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers Chris Thorogood

Allen Lane, pp.288, 25

Plants regularly lose out to animals in the charisma stakes. In Pathless Forest, Chris Thorogood seeks to promote a new face of Southeast Asian conservation: Rafflesia, one of the strangest and most gruesome plants on the planet.

Rafflesia is a parasitic plant, deriving everything that it needs from its host, spending most of its life as a microscopic thread hidden inside a vine.

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