Dear Thomas,

Every few years, a smell like a rotting corpse wafts around a stairwell at Washington State University Vancouver. But it’s not really a dead body. It’s the bloom of the corpse flower plant.

There are fewer than 1,000 corpse flower plants left in the wild. It’s one of the rarest plants in the world.

But the list of rare plants is massive. If you look at all the plants we know about in the world, there are about 435,000 different kinds of plants—and many more we don’t know about. Some scientists say that more one-third of all plants are “exceedingly rare.”

I asked my friend Dawn Freeman what makes a plant rare. She’s responsible for the WSU corpse flower.

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