The 'giant misshapen penis' flower sums up our simple human need for joy

Thousands of people queued in Australia last week to smell a flower. The corpse flower, which blooms once every few years, but for only around 24 hours, opened at Sydney Botanic Gardens. There have been similar flowering events in the UK. Kew has a corpse flower, but it rarely commands the same volume of interest.

The Amorphophallus titanum, (which means giant misshapen penis – everyone’s a critic, I suppose) hooked in more than 15,000 curious punters. The horticulturists in Sydney compared the volume of focus to the 2000 Olympics in the city. 

The Australians, with a typical Aussie love of keeping it punchy, called the flower Putricia (putrid Patricia – not clear why they named it Patricia initially). It can grow to around 10 feet and smells, among other things, like rotten flesh. There were several thousand people online watching a live feed, but it is the huge number in person that is interesting.

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There is something very Victorian in queuing for such a public happening, like gathering at a Great Exhibition to feast on the wonders of the world beyond. It is reassuring that in a time when everything is available at once online, there remains a human desire to be somewhere and experience something unique. 

There has been over a century of behavioural analysis on why a group assembles around something like this. Most of it suggests it’s because we’re social creatures and crave connection. Clearly, they hadn’t met my great uncle Tanic. 

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Without doubt, you’d welcome me, a complete non-expert, getting into some cod psychology here. But I’ll leave that moment for later. I don’t have time to extrapolate on something I glanced over on Wikipedia. Rather, isn’t it possible that the desire to be there is because of something really simple – a search for a moment of joy. 

Martin Amis said once that cities at night contain men who cry in their sleep and then say nothing. Beyond a stiff upper lip this suggested a kind of deadening, a need to get on in the world, then go home and be gripped by a sense of something that contains and constrains and can never be positively changed, not really. 

It always struck me as one of the saddest ideas. And it is international and not just covering men. 

In the moment we find ourselves, when that thrusting young buck in the White House seems determined to bring his own mutant chaos to the world; when AI, that is difficult to understand, feels to be racing ahead of us; when children simply die in temporary accommodation – 80 last year in England, EIGHTY, living and dying in a place children shouldn’t have to be; when the world seems gripped in an existential moment of climate on the brink and autocrats on the rise, with all this, it’s easy to feel that the grind is a little much.

Which is why joy, simple joy, is so completely, insistently important. Where you find it is less important than its existence. We need to allow ourselves to have these moments, whether it’s with family or in the clear open air, or when you see Lisandro Martínez, with his barrio sneer, sticking his shoulder into a rival player, several inches taller, and letting him see what’s what. (I have individual tastes.)

There has never been a more necessary time for us all to find a way to pause and smell the flowers. Regardless of how they smell.

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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