Like other species in its genus, this plant has no leaves, stems, roots or chlorophyll, instead stealing all its nutrition from Tetrastigma lanceolaurium, a rainforest liana.

The anatomy of this plant has devolved into mycelium-like strands of cells infecting the internal vascular system of its host.

When they fly inside the large pot-like structure in the middle of the flower, they find a central column inside, topped with a wart-covered disc-like plate; under the rim of this plate they find a small crevice, into which they crawl believing they have found an opening into the soft parts of a rotting body -instead, the rim is shaped in such a way that, when investigating, their backs are thus smeared with the jelly-like pollen if the Rafflesia flower is male, or it is pressed against a zone of modified stigmas if the flower is female.

Rafflesia patma was first collected in 1824 from the then still completely forested Indonesian island of Kembangan, located off the Indian Ocean coast of Java.

[3] Kees van Steenis, on the other hand, states it was Blume himself who did all of his collecting, and likely analysed his specimens and wrote the descriptions in situ in preparation for publication.

Mabberley was apparently himself ignorant of the preceding synonymy with Rhizanthes, and did not consult the relevant works, and as such synonymised the species with the largest flowers on Java, R. patma, with R. horsfieldii, with the simple explanation of "Brown's remarks".

[10] Nevertheless, as of October 2020[update], databases such as Plants of the World Online have indexed Mabberley's taxonomic interpretation,[2] although R. patma is accepted as the correct name for the extant taxon by other sources.

[3] Rafflesia patma is a holoparasite of Tetrastigma lanceolaurium, a rainforest liana in the Vitaceae, the botanical family that includes the grape vine.