Odoardo Beccari was hardly a botanical novice by the time he traveled to Sumatra, Indonesia, the island near Malaysia and the Phillippines. He had discovered numerous new species of palm trees and documented much exotic flora and fauna. Still, he must have been surprised by the nearly 20-foot flowers he came across; particularly as they gave off a fragrance of rotten meat. Beccari took a few seeds with him back to Italy, from where they made their way to England and then the United States.

On this day, June 8, in 1937 visitors and media converged in the New York Botanical garden to witness and record a rare blooming of their 44-inch-high Amorphallus titanum, dubbed the “corpse flower” for its smell.

The flower opened to resemble what one reporter described as “4-foot wide ruffled umbrella with a maroon interior.” A gigantic eight-foot yellow stalk rose up skyward from the flower, bearing some 5,500 brightly-colored seeds. No visitors were allowed to touch the flower, which was behind glass of the garden’s hothouse — and just as well, since a four-foot wide eight-foot high flower with odor of rancid meat could not have been pleasant to behold.