Now this is odd - corpse flower

From Atlas Obscura:

Why Are So Many Corpse Flowers Blooming at Once?
If Friday’s announcement that the New York Botanical Garden’s corpse flower was in bloom—the first occurrence in the city since 1939—inspired a sense of dejá vu, it may not be all in your head. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out that over half a dozen of the gigantic plants have bloomed this year in the United States, unusually, at the same time.

What's going on?

Titan arums (scientifically known as Amorphophallus titanum), commonly known as the “corpse flower” is a truly unique plant. According to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which hosted the first titan arums to bloom in cultivation in 1889, the plant boasts “one of the largest flowering structures and one of the foulest odours in the plant kingdom.” The smell produced by the flower is so gross—and so multi-faceted in its composition, with descriptions ranging from “Limburger cheese” to “rotting flesh” to “one thousand pukes”—that scientists have made efforts to isolate and identify the chemical compounds that inspire the plant’s popular nickname. The odor is believed to be intended to attract insects that feed and/or breed in carrion and dung, tricking them into serving as pollinators for the plant. Thankfully, according to The Washington Post, producing the odor requires a tremendous amount of energy, “so the odor is fleeting and comes in waves or, more likely, tsunamis.” Meaning that while the odor is one of the most recognizable features of the plant, most visitors to the New York Botanical Garden won’t have to cope with the smell.

If the idea of seeing a ten-foot-tall flower without being overwhelmed by a horrific stench disappoints you, there’s good news! The Guardian notes that corpse flowers are expected to bloom soon (or have just started blooming) in Washington, D.C., Bloomington, Indiana, and Sarasota, Florida. That’s on top of blooms earlier this year in Chicago, Charleston, Illinois, and Winter Park, Florida. Considering that the University of Wisconsin tracked only 157 recorded corpse flower blooms between 1889 and 2008, that’s a lot of corpse flowers blooming in just one country over just one year.

A lot of these plants are "cousins" coming from the same mother plant as cuttings so that may explain the synchronicity - also, there are a lot more corpse flowers out there. They are a spectacular blossom and can draw quite a crowd.