Press release | We too have an Olympic champion🥇in Meise Botanic Garden - on its way to a Guinness World Record!

Meise, 13 August 2024. Meise Botanic Garden sets a world record! Worldwide, we have the largest titan arum in bloom! The titan arum which has started flowering last night after closing time is a real heavyweight. The tuber of the plant weighs a whopping 112 (!) kilos. At 3.21 m tall, it is the largest recorded flowering titan arum ever bloomed in the world!

Guinness World Record

Today, bailiff Wout Van Der Haegen will accurately measure the plant at 8:30 am. The preparations and counting will be filmed to qualify for a world record. This way, the Botanic Garden can enter the Guinness Book of Records. The bailiff will measure from the top of the tuber. However, Meise Botanic Garden  will beat the previous Guinness record in 2010 by Louis Riccardiello in Gilford, America, which measured 3m10. The first world record recorded by Guinness was an inflorescence of 3m06 from 2003 at the Bonn Botanic Garden.

Craftsmanship

Meise Botanic Garden saw its first titan arum bloom in 2008, attracting more than 8,000 visitors in just a few days. Since then, 20 titan arums have flowered, attracting large numbers of visitors each time. The specimen now in bloom was sown by Ghent Botanic Garden in 2005 and came to Meise Botanic Garden in 2014. Exchanges between different botanical gardens worldwide help promote genetic diversity. 

Getting a titan arum in bloom remains a rarity. Thanks to the skills of our gardeners, who pamper and care for our titan arums, we now have five healthy adult specimens in the collection. Of these, one or more alternate blooms every year, which is no mean feat. Only with the right temperature, humidity and nutrition you will achieve this beautiful result. Stijn Stappaerts, the gardener responsible for the titan arums, says: "I have already received congratulations from my fellow gardeners worldwide, even all the way from Australia, asking me: How do you succeed in this? Getting a titan arum to flower in culture is already not easy, growing one over three meters is very, very exceptional! In Meise Botanic Garden, thanks to the recently inaugurated Green Ark, we can create the ideal growing conditions. And therefore also conduct cutting-edge research and protection programmes for endangered species such as the titan arum."

Visiting the wonder of the world

This is the 20th flowering of a titan arum in Meise Botanic Garden, after another specimen (2m17 tall) flowering last week.

Both plants can be admired in the Citrus Orangery of the Green Ark, the new conservatory complex where the rare and endangered plants of the Botanic Garden are nurtured.

Meise Botanic Garden will remain open until 9pm during both days of flowering (Tuesday 13 and Wednesday 14 August). Last entry for visitors is at 7.30pm, Friends of the Botanic Garden (subscribers) can enter until 8.30pm.

Website: https://www.plantentuinmeise.be/en/pQgEJhm/titan-arum

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/plantentuinmeise2