In the natural world, the beauties of flowers always have an ethereal and fleeting beauty incomparable to anything else in the world. Unluckily, there are lots of rare flowers that have already gone extinct in the wild and only exist in scarcity. If you are curious to know about and enjoy these rare flowers from all over the world, the Top 16 Rare Flowers will help you have a chance to explore amazing things. Those flowers that bloom only once every few decades and those that require certain conditions to bloom, make them unique.
1 Shenzen Nongke Orchid (Gloriosa Rothschildiana ‘Shenzen Nongke’)
Image source: lingkarmadiun
This orchid of the Gloriosa genus may be rare, but it is also very famous. It has green to yellow petals with a bright magenta labellum (central petal). And it may look like any ordinary orchid. But this cultivar developed in China is very rare and sought after, and it only blooms once every 4 or 5 years.
2 Stinking Corpse Lily (Rafflesia Arnoldii)
Image source: aurifil
Stinking corpse lily is massive, rare, unusual, it stinks to high heavens! It will attack it with an overwhelming stench of rotting flesh! The massive flowers grow straight out of the ground and they are red, round, and huge, up to 4 feet wide (120 cm). They are parasites and they have no leaves.
3 Gibraltar Campion (Silene Tomentosa)
Image source: jmwisbeymiller
Gibraltar campion may not look striking or exotic, but it is very rare indeed. It has five white to pink-violet split petals. It looks similar to much more common members of the same genus, like the very common Silene latifolia you can find in most temperate prairies, white campion.
4 Gold Of Kinabalu, A.K.A. Rothschild’s Slipper Orchid (Paphiopedilum Rothschildianium)
Image source: orchidsplus
This plant has very marked and bright colors and it only grows on mountains, above 500 meters (1640 feet).
5 Cooke’s Kokio (Kokia Cookei)
Image source: flickr
Cooke’s kokio is a rare Hawaiian flowering plant with a weird look. The leaves are pretty, large, and similar to that if ivy, fine. They are large deep crimson red and they look like two cocker spaniel’s ears with a long plume in the middle.
6 Western Underground Orchid (Rhizanthella Gardneri)
Image source: flickr
Western Underground Orchid is a rare and absurdly strange flower It always stays underground! It produces petal-shaped pink bracts which hold loads of small bright red flowers inside. Up to 100 indeed. It looks a bit like an open pomegranate shaped into a flower.
7 Chocolate Cosmos (Cosmos Astrosanguoneus)
Image source: longfield-gardens
Chocolate cosmos is rare, it is beautiful but it is not brown. In fact, it does not take its name from the beautiful dolor of its petals. These are of the deepest and velvety dark red. Its aroma though makes it unusual, but not rare. Its flowers do not produce seeds, so it can’t reproduce sexually and it is totally extinct in the wild.
8 Jade Vine (Strongylodon Macrobotrys)
Image source: freepik
Jade vine, a.k.a. emerald vine is another very weird and rare flowering plant. It is a woody vine from the Philippines with long stems and large, elliptical dark leaves. They come in big drooping clusters and they look a bit like claws or the beaks of parrots. On the blue to turquoise shade, it is very ethereal and otherworldly, almost ghost-like.
9 Ghost Orchid (Dendrophylax Lindenii)
Image source: floridamuseum
Ghost orchid has white to pale green flowers that look like ghosts, those “made of bedsheets” sort of visitors from the spiritual world. The labellum in fact grows downward and forward with two side wings and a waving shape. Like a ghost (or a bed sheet) in the breeze.
10 Red Indian Pipe (Monotropa Uniflora)
Image source: inaturalist
Indian pipe or ghost plant is a flower from a parallel universe. It is totally white, with translucent stems and bell-shaped flowers. It is weird because it has no chlorophyll. It is one of the few plants that do not have a photosynthesis process.
11 Dutchman’s Pipe Cactus (Epiphyllum Oxypetalum)
Image source: etsy
This flower has long trailing stems that produce amazing and exotic large white flowers. These have a cup of two rows of petals in the center and then back petals that form like a crown around it.
12 Sea Daffodil (Pancratium Maritimum)
Image source: cekiste
Sea daffodil is a wonder of Mediterranean beaches, but a rare one at that. It has beautiful white flowers with shorter petals at the front and then long and thin white petals that curve back at the back of the flower. Like a white Sun with long rays. It grows straight out of the sand in clumps during the summer season, which makes it quite unusual too.
13 Titan Arum (Amorphophallus Titanum)
Image source: conservatoryofflowers
Titan arum or corpse flower is a celebrity among rare flowers. The plant itself will leave its few, large, and oval-shaped green leaves as the only sign of its existence for years. Then, this colossal flower will suddenly come out of the soil and attract pollinators from miles away. This usually happens once every 7 to 10 years! The heaviest titan arum on record weighed a whopping 339 lb. (153.9 Kg).
14 Parrot’s Beak (Lotus Berthelotii)
Image source: anniesannuals
Parrot’s beak is rare, the flowers look like flaming parrot beaks pointing up from the crawling branches of this plant. They come in fairly large groups and they can be flaming red or bright yellow. This makes them a great spectacle with excellent gardening value.
15 Youtan Poluo (Uncertain Scientific Name)
Image source: thekayasthajournal
This flower is only one millimeter across as a flower (0.04 inches)… It is white and it grows on a spiderweb-thin stalk. They are so tiny that they are easily confused for small insects, like aphids. It blooms very, very rarely, allegedly only once every – 3,000 years!
16 Black Bat Flower (Tacca Chantrieri)
Image source: plantcaretoday
Flowers can hardly get any stranger than the rare black bat flower. It looks like a weird bat, even like an alien being, with wide dark wings and long filaments radiating from the middle. And then there are little “eyes” or “tony heads on long necks” that come towards you from the middle of this very unusual composition.
