“Cewek atau cowok,” someone in the crowd yells out to the kneeling biologist. “Is it male or female?”

Arms on the ground, the biologist faces her rear-end to us and focuses on guiding a dentist mirror along the innards of the newly bloomed Rafflesia. She wrinkles her nose and squints.

This Saturday the Bogor Botanical garden announced the blooming of one of its Rafflesias—a once-in-fifty-year happening.

Flowers of the genus Rafflesia are commonly known as corpse lilies—a reference to their scent and the pollinating flies that flock around these fantastical inflorescences.

Native to the southeast Asian countries of Thailand, the Malay peninsula, the Philippines and Indonesian archipelago, these parasitic plants are best known for three things: the size of their flowers (between a television and a small satellite disk); how rare it is to see them (the parasitic plants tap into the root system of the Tetrastigma wild grape genus, blooming once every 50-80 years) and their smell.

In 2007, the Bogor Botanical garden started to cultivate a Western Javanese strain of the plant, Rafflesia patma. And their pruning and preening has since yielded two rounds of blooms.

According to a stub on the Rafflesia genus on Wikipedia, botanical information on this particular species was first collected on the “Alcatraz” of Java.

Past inmates to Kembangan Island include Indonesian literary icon Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Tommy Suharto and those linked to the 2002 Bali bombing.

Strangely enough, these plants, on their half-century flowering cycle, are sexually dimorphic. This means gendered, having male and female flowers.

And this is what the kneeling biologist in the garden is researching. The male flowers have bristles under their anther disk while the females don’t. Which one was this new specimen?

Sexual dimorphism would seem evolutionarily unfortunate for a species that rarely blooms.

The signboard at the garden said that the trait was actually an evolutionary defense. Parasites that live off the root system of another species, the plants only bloom once their host is fully mature, an indication that their habitat was a healthy enough to sustain a new generation of Rafflesia.

This might shed light on the plants’ rankness. Only able to find a sexual partner twice in a century might force a plant to bring out its strongest perfume.

Also on view at the Botanical garden, a strange array of Asian politicians with orchids:

Here’s Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, admiring a plant through his shades.

Here’s Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, admiring a plant through his shades.

Another of Sukarno’s daughter and Indonesia’s fourth president, Megawati, touring the garden grounds with Kim Jong-Il!

Even larger flowers.

And my landlady Anny fixing to capture what I’d like to say is a golden doll for no other reason than the strange name.