This weekend, an intense smell enveloped New York Botanical Garden visitors (and another such event just took place in Washington, DC). For the second time in nearly 80 years an enormous rare flower bloomed in the garden emitting the strong and unsettling smell of rotting carrion. The titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) belongs to a group of "corpse flowers" or "carrion flowers" as they are aptly referred to, that includes the rafflesias, stapelias and some of the bulbophillu