Hundreds in California line up for blooming ‘corpse flower’

ALAMEDA, Calif. (AP) — Residents of a San Francisco Bay Area city flocked to an abandoned gas station to get a whiff of a corpse flower _ so-called because of the stench it emits when it blooms _ after its owner decided to share the rare plant with his neighbors. The San Francisco Chronicle reports Solomon Leyva, a nursery owner in Alameda who deals in exceptionally rare plants, had been posting on social media about his amorphophallus titanum. When he saw a lot of interest in the giant blooming flower, he decided to wheel it Monday to the abandoned building, where a line of people stretched down the block for most of the day.