World's largest flower....

Rafflesia is a genus of parasitic flowering plants. It contains approximately 28 species (including
four incompletely characterized
species as recognized by Willem Meijer in 1997), all found in southeastern
Asia, on the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, Thailand and the Philippines.
Rafflesia was found in the Indonesian rain forest by an Indonesian guide working for Dr. Joseph Arnold in 1818, and named after Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the leader of the expedition. It was discovered even
earlier by Louis Deschamps in Java between 1791 and 1794, but his
notes and illustrations, seized by the
British in 1803, were not available to
western science until 1861.
The plant has no stems, leaves or true
roots. It is an endoparasite of vines in the genus Tetrastigma (Vitaceae), spreading 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 five-petaled flower. In some species, such as Rafflesia arnoldii, the flower may be over 100 centimetres
(39 in) in diameter, and weigh up to
10 kilograms (22 lb). Even the smallest
species, R. baletei, has 12 cm diameter
flowers. The flowers look and smell
like rotting flesh, hence its local names which translate to "corpse flower" or
"meat flower" (but see below). The
vile smell attracts insects such as flies,
which transport pollen from male to
female flowers. Most species have
separate male and female flowers, but a few have bisexual flowers. Little is
known about seed dispersal.
However, tree shrews and other forest mammals apparently eat the fruits and
disperse the seeds. Rafflesia is an
official state flower of Indonesia, also Sabah state in Malaysia, as well as for the Surat Thani Province, Thailand. The name "corpse flower" applied to
Rafflesia is confusing because this
common name also refers to the Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum) of the family Araceae. Moreover, because Amorphophallus has the world's
largest unbranched inflorescence, it is sometimes mistakenly credited as
having the world's largest flower. Both
Rafflesia and Amorphophallus are
flowering plants, but they are still
distantly related. Rafflesia arnoldii has the largest single flower of any
flowering plant, at least when one
judges this by weight.
Amorphophallus titanum has the
largest unbranched inflorescence,
while the Talipot palm (Corypha umbraculifera) forms the largest
branched inflorescence, containing
thousands of flowers; this plant is
monocarpic, meaning that individuals
die after flowering.