You have to feel kind of bad for Mr. Wilson. Sure, Dennis the Menace was just trying to warn him that his house was being robbed, but he spent his whole, sad, adult life waiting for his precious plant to bloom for just a few seconds and he missed it. It's a lesson in disappointment.

The flower that Mr. Wilson's fictional flora is based on is blooming in Denver, and thousands of people have flooded the Denver Botanic Gardens to catch a glimpse and a whiff. The titan arum, or corpse flower, blooms only a few times in its life, and each time it smells disgusting.

“It’s the equivalent of the circus coming to town,” Alan Walker, a volunteer at the gardens, told the New York Times. He finds it a little weird that “all these people would line up for something that smells like a combination of Limburger cheese and gym socks.”

So do we. The first people in line to see and smell the fabled flower were handed souvenir barf bags. Charming.

But the flower is pretty. Its deep purple petal wraps around a yellow spadix that can grow up to 10 feet high.

The flower started to bloom on Tuesday and was broadcast live over StinkyCam, which allowed viewers to see the rare plant without gagging.

“Personally I think it smells like old cabbage, maybe a couple of dead mice,” said Rich Clark, a guard from Big Al’s Security, which is the best name for a security company ever. Others described the stench as "a chicken in a trash bag inside a metal garbage can left outside for a sunny few days," a "decaying corpse" or some "Italian sausage." Yum.