Meet Lois, the biggest non-odorous tease in Houston

Here’s a slight detour from the previously announced schedule. I’ll get back to it shortly.

Yesterday, we drove three hours round-trip to see a giant plant that did nothing. Well, ostensibly the purpose of our trip was to reclaim The Boy after a week at golf camp, but the main attraction was Lois, the Amorphophallus titanum at the Houston Museum of Natural Science that has become a local celebrity of sorts over the past couple of weeks.

Lois, it seems, is about to bloom. And that’s a rarity. According to sources who would know better than I would, there’s only been 28 other bloomings of the species in the United States and only one other in Texas. Since we all know nothing’s important if it didn’t happen in Texas, this is for all intents and purposes a very big deal. Even the Japanese sent a well-equipped contingent to document the thing.

When in bloom, the plants are quite colorful, reach up to 10 feet in height and six feet in diameter. They only bloom for about 48 hours. And they emit a horrible smell reminiscent of rotting flesh, leading to its oh-so charming common name, the “Corpse Flower.”

But its actual scientific name is pretty awesome too. According to the good folks over at Wikipedia, Amorphophallus titanum basically boils down to ancient Greek for “giant misshaped penis.” So this flower really has a lot going for it.

Unfortunately for us though, Lois didn’t have much going on yesterday. Despite predictions that she’d bloom as early as last weekend, she’s still closed up tighter than a Chick-fil-A on Sunday and not emitting any odor of any kind. So the kids looked at it for a few minutes, wondered what the big deal was and then took a photo to document their near-miss with something memorable.

Then we moved on to exploring the rest of the Cockrell Butterfly Center. They rode giant plastic caterpillars, looked at weird bugs, watched butterflies emerge from their cocoons and took a stroll through the center’s giant atrium. Or butterfliarium. I’m not sure what the technical term is. In any case, there were plenty of beautiful butterflies to see.

So in review: the butterfly center is pretty awesome and worth the trip. Lois, not so much.