The Science of Big, Weird Flowers

摘要

Right up there with the world's largest collection of airsickness bags (Niek Vermeulen's 2,112 specimens in the Netherlands) and the world's most decorated woman (Canadian "strip artiste" Krystyne Kolorful, with 95 percent of her skin tatooed), the 1998 Guinness Book of World Records awards the honor of the world's largest bloom to Rafflesia arnoldii of Southeast Asia. A single one of the meat-red flowers can stretch 3 feet across and weigh 36 pounds, according to the arbiter of superlatives. In 1818, the plant flabbergasted the Western explorers who first found it, and today it can still knock the syntax out of the lucky few who see it in bloom.