There are more than a few reasons to visit Kew Gardens, London’s botanical paradise.

For one, the botanical gardens houses more than 50,000 different plants, as well as a library packed with 750,000 botany-focused texts and 7 million preserved flowers and plants.

It’s a beautiful place for a stroll, and to marvel at the world’s largest collection of plant species. And in the modern day, the UNESCO World Heritage site hosts special events and concerts too.

But one reason that people flock to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew is more than a little unusual.

It’s home to some of the world’s stinkiest plants.

Every time the Garden’s famous 10 foot tall ‘corpse flower’ (Titan arum) blooms, the botanical garden extends its opening hours, since locals and tourists alike queue for hours to get a whiff of the rotting-flesh scent of the rare plant.

But recently, an even more unusual plant was in bloom at Kew.

And, though it only blooms for 48 hours once every few years, the spectacular Pseudohydrosme gabunensis has crowds flocking to London to experience its equally unusual scent.

According to an instagram announcement from Kew, this is the first time that Londoners have had a chance to see (and smell) this endangered plant in full bloom, since it was only cultivated from seed here a couple of years ago, with the first ever seedlings produced as a result of the notoriously difficult pollination process.

And what smell will greet visitors to the spectacular plant, which is housed in the Orchid Zone of the Princess of Wales Conservatory?

Rotting socks of course!

In fact, the scent of the Pseudohydrosme gabunensis has been described as a mixture of old cabbage and rotting cheese.

Delightful.

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