Titan Arum – it’s the largest flower in the world.  It grows only the Sumatra Island of Indonesia.  Its petals grow more than one and a half feet long and one inch thick and the flower weighs 15 pounds.  Sir Stamford Raffles, who founded the British colony of Singapore in 1819 discovered it while he and a friend were exploring the island.  Before that people who lived there just called it big flower.  Very big, very beautiful, but it smells very bad.  Actually it reeks and that’s to attract flies for pollination.

There are about 200,000 kinds of flowers in the world.  We told you about the biggest one.  The smallest one is the duckweed, which can only be seen with a microscope.  It has one to three leaves that grow only 1/16th to 1/8th of an inch long. 

The oldest living thing on earth is a flowering shrub called the creosote bush, found in the Mojave Desert.  It’s 50 feet in diameter and started from a seed nearly 12,000 years ago making it four times older than the giant sequoias of California.  The creosote bush is older than the invention of the wheel and writing and came before the construction of the great Egyptian and Mayan pyramids.

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