Раффлезия - самый большой цветок на планете

Raflesia

• A plant with no leaves, no roots, no stem and the biggest flower in the world sounds like the stuff of comic books or science fiction .

• 'It is perhaps the largest and most magnificent flower in the world' was how Sir Stamford Raffles described his discovery in 1818 of Rafflesia arnoldii, modestly named after himself and his companion, surgeon-naturalist Dr James Arnold.

• This jungle parasite of south-east Asia holds the all-time record-breaking bloom of 106.7 centimetres (3 ft 6 in) diameter and 11 kilograms (24 lb) weight, with petal-like lobes an inch thick .

• It is one of the rarest plants in the world and on the verge of extinction.

• Rafflesia is also one of the world's most distasteful plants, designed to imitate rotting meat or dung.

• . There are at least 13 species of Rafflesia, but two of them have already been unsighted since the Second World War and are presumed extinct, and the record-holding Rafflesia arnoldii is facing extinction. To make matters worse, no one has ever cultivated Rafflesia in a garden or laboratory

•   It lives inside  vines  of the genus  Tetrastigma  ( Vitaceae ). It spreads its  absorptive  organ, the haustorium, inside the tissue of the vine. The only part of the plant that can be seen outside the host vine is the flower.