Two corpse flowers bloomed simultaneously at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, drawing over 7,000 visitors on Monday to witness the rare event. The titan arums, named Odorysseus and Odora, began unfurling over the weekend, with each bloom lasting only 24 to 48 hours. Staff notified the public Sunday afternoon as the towering plants reached their peak overnight, slowly closing the following day. Visitors still caught the fleeting spectacle on Monday, with some waiting three hours for a few minutes of olfactory adventure.

"People were enchanted," said Brandon Tam, curator of the Huntington's orchid collection. "People were curious, people were inspired. People started to fall in love, if they haven't already been falling in love, with plants because of this poster child of a plant." Advance tickets sold out by late Monday morning. The corpse flowers remain on display until early August.

The Titan Arum, famous for its pungent odor resembling rotting flesh, uses that charm to attract carrion beetles and flesh flies for pollination. Native to western Sumatra, Indonesia, the endangered plant is not a single flower but a giant structure of hundreds of tiny blooms, growing over 12 feet tall. After its brief flowering, it collapses into a dormant period lasting years.

The Huntington has cultivated titan arums for over 25 years, now boasting more than 43 mature specimens, many from a successful pollination in 2002. "We pollinated a corpse flower, which produced hundreds of fruits and seeds we would propagate," Tam said. Seedlings were shared with other U.S. botanical gardens to help conserve the species, with fewer than 1,000 believed to remain in the wild.