Why is a flower that smells like rotting flesh so popular?

The plant was gifted to the Gardens in 2002 after being sown at the Hortus Botanicus facility in the Dutch city of Leiden.

At that stage the “corm,” the underground structure from which the plant grows, was the size of an orange.

Eight years later, the gardens had to borrow scales used to weigh elephants at Edinburgh Zoo, after it grew to more than 150kg – making it one of the largest specimens ever recorded.

The corm spends long periods absorbing massive amounts of energy and nutrients from the soil before releasing it in a surge that creates one of the tallest flowering structures of any plant.

It did not flower for the first time until 2015, but has since steadily bloomed every two to three years.

“In a sense, it might never die,” said Dr Dalberg Poulsen.

“The first time it flowered here in 2015, we thought it would die after it finished flowering, it would have exhausted itself but it didn’t.

“Tropical plants have a root that grows along the ground, they can do that theoretically forever.”