Bizarre Plants
Every year about this time the Voodoo Lilies begin to grow. They were here when we bought our house in 1992, and have since been moved to another part of the garden. In 1992, there was no garden, just dirt and sand and these odd tubers. I've since found information about them in several books. We are gradually making our little backyard into our vision of a tropical paradise. In this vision, strange flowers, night bloomers, odd shapes and weird inflorescences abound. Voodoo lilies, also popularly called devil's tongue, corpse flowers or arum, are related to Jack-in-the-pulpit and Amorphophallus titanium (Titan Arum). The Titan Arum first flowered in the western hemisphere at the New York Botanical Gardens in August 1937. According to Bizarre Plants by William A. Emboden, "Visitors other than scientists and reporter-photographers were so numerous that they had to file by the greenhouse and view the the 'beast' through the glass panes. Had they...