Visitors to a university backyard can deal with their nostrils to the heady scent of “rotting cabbages or decomposing useless rats” as a “exceptional” orchid blooms.

Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis is emitting its pleasant aroma at the Cambridge College Botanic Backyard.

The plant, from Asia, flowers just about every three to four many years but “it’s incredibly rare to see it in flower outside its purely natural habitat”, the college back garden explained.

The “full stinker” is irresistible to carrion flies which pollinate it.

Putting up about the orchid on Facebook, and inviting website visitors to sample the nasal terrible, the backyard garden wrote: “You can expect to know you happen to be having near when you commence to scent the sensitive aroma of rotting cabbages.

“The odour has also been described as smelling like ‘dead rats decomposing upcoming to rotting fish’.

“To the carrion flies and beetles that pollinate it in the wild, it smells awesome.”

The aroma arrives from “mimicking a little something that is rotting, and it is accomplishing that to draw in carrion flies, which are insects that feed on rotting meat and greens”, the garden explained.

The Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis is an epiphyte – a plant that grows on an additional plant but will get its possess nutrition from the bordering air and rainwater.

Volunteer Phil Gould, who has been tending the orchid, reported it retains a “malodorous fascination” for him.

And they do not still imagine it has achieved its “ponging peak”, but reported that ought to be “any time quickly”.

The botanic yard is no stranger to smelly plants. Its Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) plant, with an aroma akin to rotting flesh, attracted hordes of guests when it bloomed in 2004, 2015 and 2017.

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