Night time flowers, evening roses. Bless this garden that never closes

Researchers at Tokyo University have announced a step forward in the international effort to breed a new race of humans who are smaller than pot-plants, thereby alleviating the various resource crises that threaten to end civilisation as we know it. The latest laboratory subject, only 32 centimeters tall, is not even up to the edge of the flower.

The plant, a Reykjavik Exhibitionist Lily (also known as the Zipper-Malfunction or the Honestly-Officer) is native to Iceland but is grown in many botanical gardens and research institutes around the world in order to have a standard of comparison. When the flower opens it exudes an aroma of fermenting shark meat and rotting sheep's-head in order to attract the midget Icelanders who comprise its natural pollinator.

For many decades the record was held by this 36-centimeter subject, produced by a team at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.






UPDATE: Bonus Infra-red Imagery

You often encounter the claim that the Reykjavik Exhibitionist Lily is an endothermic flower that spreads its attractive aromatic perfumes further afield by warming up its spadix with internal heat. This is a mistake, though an understandable one, as the bishop said to the plainclothes policeman. The confusion occurs when Lost Boys, living underground in a cave or burrow, disguise their chimneys as flower-spikes in order to conceal their whereabouts from the pirates.

Given the smell from the squalor in which they live without a Mother to clean up for them, the Exhibitionist Lily is their obvious choice of floral disguise.