Stonking Stinking Plants
Stinkers are not the sort of plants you want to grow in a normal garden. So here are a few to avoid unless your adenoids stop you getting even the faintest whiff.
Proper Stinkers
- Stinking Hellebore gives off the smell of rotting meat to earn the Latin name Helleborus foetidis and warn us that the plant is poisonous. It’s flowers native are beautiful but the whole plant niffs.
- Stinking Henbane or Hyoscyamus niger has a sickly evil smell that Culpepper says’ the whole plant hath a very ill soderiferous smell’.
- Stinking Meadow rue has a sticky covering on its leaves that also smell like dead fish
- Stinkhorn fungus has putrid, spore-laden, phallus-like fruiting bodies that appear almost overnight and to many people it is ‘Top of the Pongs’.
- Carnivorous plants attract flesh and fecal-loving insects to visit their stinking blossoms but they won’t attract me.
- The Skunk Cabbage takes some beating as you may expect with a name like that aka Lysimachia punctata
All this without farmyard smells, rotting vegetation, over wet sour compost, garlic breath in the wrong place, animal waste, the list of pet hates is endless. Thankfully there are even more good smelling plants than bad so just watch how you sniff
