I've added two images of Sauromatum guttatum (aka S. venosum) to the wiki. Take a look at: <http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/… These are blooming now and are totally disgusting! The newly opened spathe is really interesting, even beautiful and colorful. The long gently curving spadix gives the inflorescence a graceful quality. But the stench!!!!! Other malodorous aroids smell of carrion. This one reeks of fresh, warm rat feces. It's amazing to me how pervasive this stench is in the garden. I noticed it the other day while working on the other side of the house the offending plants were fifty or sixty feet away. The flies noticed it, too: they are all over it. Later in the year I'll post photos of the foliage (decorative and tropical) and, if they appear, the interesting fruits. These fruits look a bit like pomegranates. Here.s a Sauromatum story which I hope I have not posted before. Years ago, a female rat got into the house and raised a family before we realized what was going on. When I found the nest, the smell was awful. The rats would not touch baited traps, so I resorted to Warfarin. It worked. Within a week, the nauseating stench of dead rat emanated from crevices deep within the house. The experience, one I hope never to repeat, made a deeply offensive impression on me. Now fast forward several years. Im in the storage area of the basement cleaning in late winter. I catch a whiff of something disturbingly familiar: it's the rat smell again, not the smell of dead rat, which is bad enough but at least carries the consolation that it announces the end of a problem, but live rat, live rat with a healthy digestive tract and evidently eating very well indeed. With growing senses of dread and apprehension I begin to sniff around and try to find the source of the smell. I go for the obvious places: behind bookcases, near faucets, deep in ground level closets. I'm not finding anything. not even traces of rat activity. It's not making sense: the smell is not coming from the places where you would expect to find a rat. I twitch my nose a few times, and it seems to indicate a nearby shelf. I stare towards the apparent source of the smell, and suddenly there it is, a rat tail hanging out of a tangle of stored items. I plan my attack. But wait a minute: the rat tail is not moving at all. The rat tail does not seem to have any hair on it. The rat tail is not a rat tail, it's the spadix of a Sauromatum which had been stored on the shelf. The spadix was promptly snapped off (the spadix is the source of the stench) and thrown out into the winter garden. The rest of the plant was brought out and spent the rest of the week prompting numerous re-tellings of the latest ratstory. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@starpower.net Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, where the Sauromatum are giving the Dracunculus a run for the distinction of being the grossest plant in the garden this week.