Titan Arum

Or amorphophallus titanum.

I queued for nearly two hours to get to see this huge flower at the Botanics and it was well worth the wait.  It's not beautiful, rather ugly in fact but as we had seen another specimen at the Botanical garden in Basel earlier this year (this one in leaf form) it was great to see it in bloom.

It wasn't as smelly as it was meant to be - they think that this may be due to the fact that it is rather confused by the huge amount of daylight it gets here at Edinburgh and therefore may actually go on to bloom for longer.

It's still possible to see it today before it will topple over pretty soon.