A flower that blooms for less than 48 hours has grabbed the attention of several thousand viewers in Denver. Several people gathered this week at the Denver Botanic Gardens to get a glimpse of the extraordinary flower.

The city residents and the botanists since years have been waiting for the boom of the plant, a green and purple giant. As per the botanists, the evolutionary purpose of the smell that the plant emits is to attract pollinating bugs that normally feed on dead animals.

Alan Walker, 65, a volunteer who stood at the entrance to the gardens on Wednesday amid huge rushes said in a statement that the view and crowd at the garden was equal to the circus coming to town.

He confided that while he is a plant lover, he found it odd that all these people would line up for something that smells like a combination of Limburger cheese and gym socks.

The plant sat perched inside a greenhouse window, with its wrinkled yellow spadix, the pointy center part and thrust upward, and its ruffled maroon spathe flaring outward.

Garden workers had rolled out a red carpet at its feet, and families took turns posing for pictures in the flower's midst.

The corpse flower, famously known as the titan arum, is native to the rain forests of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, but elsewhere lives only in botanic gardens, said Nick Snakenberg, curator of tropical collections at the Denver Botanic Gardens.

The flower typically must be eight to 20 years old before it blooms for the first time; after that, it continues to bloom infrequently. Scientists know it by its Latin name, Amorphophallus titanium.