Rafflesia Park where the flowers are numbered and monitored by the park rangers. "Rafflesia" are also remarkable for showing a large horizontal transfer of genes from their host plants. This is well known among bacteria, but not higher organisms. The name "corpse flower" applied to "Rafflesia" can be 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 only distantly related. "Rafflesia arnoldii" has
Rafflesia arnoldii national flowers in Indonesia, the other two being the white jasmine and moon orchid. It was officially recognized as a national "rare flower" () in Presidential Decree No. 4 in 1993. The first European botanist to find a specimen of a "Rafflesia" was the French explorer Louis Auguste Deschamps (1765–1842). He was a member of a French scientific expedition to Asia and the Pacific. During the expedition, he spent three years on Java, where, in 1797, he collected a specimen of what is now known as "R. patma". During the return voyage in 1798, his ship was taken by the