Sit back and enjoy food, topics and trends that start on California farms and ranches. take 5
We’ll see your haunted house and raise you a haunted garden! You can turn your space into a horticultural house of horrors with any number of spooky, gruesome-looking and/or just flat-out weird plants. Some look gross; others smell gross; some are just plain fun. Here’s a quintet.
1. Ghost plant
A grow-in-the-dark bloomer
It may be part of the blueberry family, but there’s nothing blue about the ghost plant. This translucent wildflower produces blooms that look like small poltergeists and can be found all over the U.S., in shady woods at lower elevations. It does not produce its own food, unlike most other plants, and depends on other organisms to survive, according to University of California Master Gardeners. It’s even capable of growing in pitch darkness (cue nightmares).
2 . Corpse flower Phew!-tiful
It’s huge, and it smells rotten as all get-out—which is the idea. The corpse flower—officially called the titan arum—grows in the wild only in Indonesia, and is quite the attraction in greenhouses around the world. It depends on insects that feed on dead animals for pollination, hence its infamously pungent odor while in full flower—which, thankfully for our noses, happens only every three to 10 years.
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September/October 2021
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