Ted the Titan, who made a big stink in June 2003, is back in bloom and headed for the bay.

The 10-year-old corpse plant is expected to bloom within the next few days, and managers at the UC Davis Botanical Conservatory are loaning him to the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, so an expanded audience can get a whiff for themselves.

Amorphophallus titanum — also called titan arum or "corpse flower" because of its smell, which has been compared to rotting fish, bad eggs or a dead elephant — is native to Indonesia. Ted was grown from seed at the UC Davis Botanical Conservatory.

Ted also bloomed for about a week in 2003, producing a roadkill scent and marking the first blooming of a titan arum at the conservatory. Corpse plants usually take up to 15 years to bloom and rarely do so in cultivation. The 2003 blooming attracted more than 4,000 visitors and a flurry of experiments from campus scientists eager to pin down specific biological mechanisms involved in creating the pungent perfume.

For details about corpse plants that have bloomed on campus, see http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/titan/.