Arum titan (Amorphophallus titanum)

Le réveil du titan !

Cette plante, aux proportions monumentales, appartient à la famille des arums. Originaire des forêts tropicales de Sumatra, elle fut cultivée pour la première fois, comme curiosité, en 1879 au Jardin Royal de Kew à Londres. Pendant une partie de l’année, la plante se présente sous la forme d’une feuille unique de 2 à 5 mètres de haut, au limbe découpé porté par un pétiole épais et charnu qui émerge directement du sol.

Puis la feuille dépérit et il ne subsiste, en phase de repos, qu’un tubercule dont le poids augmente chaque année (le tubercule cultivé à Brest pesait 30 Kg en janvier 2007).

C’est seulement au bout d’une dizaine d’années que le tubercule produit une fleur pouvant atteindre 2,70 mètres de haut. Comme souvent chez les plantes de la famille des arums, la fleur de l’Arum titandégage une odeur nauséabonde, dont l’intensité est proportionnelle à la taille de la fleur ! Pour pousser, la plante nécessite un sol profond, fertile et humifère. Elle doit être régulièrement arrosée en période de croissance.

Le défrichement intensif des forêts tropicales indonésiennes est responsable de la régression rapide des populations sauvages de cette espèce. Cultivée au Conservatoire Botanique depuis 1995, ce plant a fleuri en 2003.

Après une période de repos de 5 mois (de janvier à mai 2007), le tubercule de l’Arum titan cultivé à Brest a produit un nouveau bourgeon qui est en train de sortir de terre. Malheureusement,le bourgeon de notre Arum titan a encore donné une feuille cette année. Il faudra donc attendre au moins l'été 2009 pour avoir peut-être une fleur !

Stinky Flowers

The titan arum lily (Amorphophallus titanium) originates from Sumatra, and stands at 6.9 ft high. The plant flowers for only two days before collapsing. The blood-red flower is renowned for its hideous smell, which is said to be a cross between burnt sugar and rotting flesh.

http://www.tmatos.com/2005_04_01_tmatos_archive.html

fORMA DE PENIS DEFORMADO TITANIC

(vcs lembram dela??)
Uma flor está atraindo muitos visitantes na Alemanha. Trata-se de uma Titan Arum (Amophophallus titanum), que está sendo cultivada em uma estufa na universidade de Bonn.


Milhares de curiosos fizeram fila para dar uma olhada no que a universidade afirma ser a flor mais alta do mundo, com 2,72 metros. A Titan Arum, natural das florestas tropicais de Sumatra (ilha no Oceano Índico), começou a florescer em 14 de março e alcançou seu recorde de altura nesta sexta (23). O evento merece a visita, pois a planta floresce apenas duas ou três vezes durante seus 40 anos de vida, em média.


A Titan também é conhecida pelo seu odor inigualável -uma nada agradável mistura de peixe podre com açúcar queimado, segundo os cientistas. O cheiro, ainda mais forte durante a noite, serve para atrair insetos polinizadores, como besouros e moscas que se alimentam de carniça.


O cheiro é composto basicamente de compostos pesados à base de enxofre, que não se propagam pelo ar facilmente. Para espalhar o "perfume" pelo ar e atrair mais insetos, a planta se aquece, consumindo carboidratos armazenados e provocando uma espécie de curto-circuito em seu sistema respiratório para maximizar a produção de calor. Com isso, a temperatura interna da flor chega a 36°C. O desgaste envolvido nesse processo explica porque a planta floresce por poucos dias e no máximo três vezes durante sua vida.
(fonte uol)

http://fiveheads.blogspot.com/2003_05_01_archive.html

The Titan Arum

by Dawn Sanders

Introduction: the spectacular plant.

During September 2004, a crowd of visitors descended on the glasshouses of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, to witness the amazing spectacle of the flowering of the giant Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum - pictured right looking like an upside down mushroom), a monumental plant, which originates from the rainforests of Sumatra. In the five days from the first unfurling of the flower over 10,000 visitors came to view this dramatic event. A web cam on the garden’s website allowed
for a wider dissemination of this extraordinary and rarely witnessed occasion. The web cam images attracted over half a million ‘hits’ and the garden received emails from around the world congratulating it on making this botanical event available to a global audience. What lessons does the gathering of these crowds at the flowering of the Titan Arum offer to teachers struggling to make botany a stimulating and exciting topic? And what exactly is a Titan Arum?

The Titan Arum

The massive ‘flower’ of the Titan Arum is in fact an inflorescence of many thousands of tiny flowers embedded in a cream spike called a spadix (Figure 1). Encircling it is a funnel-shaped spathe. This structure reaches its zenith for two days before collapsing. During this time, the accompanying stench of rotting flesh is at its peak, usually overnight for approximately 8 hours. The smell is so bad that the Sumatrans call it the ‘corpse flower’.
This cadaverous smell is emitted to attract carrion beetles or blowflies to pollinate the tiny flowers on the spadix hidden by the spathe.

Plants: the Cinderella organisms of the classroom?
In Britain, Tranter (2004) has recently observed that ‘in too many schools, the wealth of living or once living organisms which pupils are required to study is often reduced to little more than the geranium and the potato’. In addition to this absence of specimens, research has demonstrated that teaching with, and about, plants is considered to be a pedagogical challenge by many biology educators working in today’s classrooms. Key messages from this research are:

• the aforementioned reduced repertoire of specimens being used in classrooms and laboratories (see Collins and Price, 1996)
• most children and young people prefer to study animals (see Wandersee, 1986 and
  Kinchin, 1999).

It has been suggested, however, that: ‘plants are generally easier to handle in a classroom situation than animals since they do not bite, run away, or produce odours’ (Hershey, 1990, p. 68). In the light of Tranter’s (2004) observations and the findings of my recent D.Phil study on botanic gardens as environments for learning (Sanders, 2004), in which the impressions of children from three London primary schools were collected and analysed after several visits to the Chelsea Physic Garden, I would suggest that it is precisely these active, odorous characteristics of plants that excite children. Hence, for example, their identification of carnivorous plants, such as the Venus Fly Trap (Dionaea muscipula), as ‘killer plants’ and Ginkgo biloba as ‘the big smelly tree’ (Sanders, 2004). So how might teachers use this research to inform their teaching?

The American biology educators, Wandersee and Schussler (2001) use the term marquee plants, that is plants that draw attention to themselves and capture the imagination, to describe plants to be used in educational contexts. They suggest these are plants that:

• attract the public’s attention
• during some or all of their life-cycles, are capable of drawing a crowd at a botanic garden
• may serve as a doorway to greater public understanding of plants (Wandersee and
  Schussler, 2001, p. 3).

They suggest, that by using marquee plants, educators will draw attention to plants that have previously been overlooked by teachers and learners alike. By utilising internet facilities to access webcam documentation of the Titan Arum’s life-cycle or by taking classes to visit the botanic garden itself to witness the spectacle, teachers can engage their learners with a dramatic botanical event that will impact on learners’ imaginations in ways that a geranium or potato cannot. But since this is a rare occasion, how can teachers make botanical education regularly interesting and dynamic?

http://www.leef.org.uk/articles/article.php?id=29