When April showers, the air smells warm, damp, and earthy. This particular wet earth scent is called geosmin, or petricor. It is excreted by soil bacteria to advertise food to springtail, an insect-like organism, who spreads the spores by carrying them along. But it’s not only attractive to the springtail, humans are extremely sensitive to petricor. Even when it is diluted to the parts per billion range, we can still detect it. There’s something very primitive and very primal about the smell, and we love it in our perfumes. Perfumers in Kannauj, India, have been making the monsoon-infused mitti attar, or the smell of rain-soaked earth, for centuries.
As early as four thousand years ago, Egyptian wall reliefs show women holding water lilies to their noses and pressing terrestrial white lilies for perfume. The ancient Chinese heed the peach blossoms and the lotus flowers, and the ancient Greek and Romans crowned rulers and heroes with garlands of flowers. Greek writers described floral scents as being injurious to the head. In Natural History, the Roman naturalist Pliny wrote of an instance witnessing an encounter between Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Approaching the battle of Actium, Antony was said to be so distrustful toward the queen that he employed a taster before touching his food. Wishing to amuse herself with his fear, Cleopatra had the flower stigmas in her chaplet dipped in poison. At the moment of carousal and gaiety, when penetrating odors stealing insidiously upon the brain, she challenged Antony to swallow the chaplet, mixed up in their drink. But she arrested his arm just as he was on the very point of drinking, demonstrating the little effort it took had she wanted him dead. It should be noted that ancient Roman writers did not have kind words for Cleopatra. As the lover of both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, she was a foreigner at the heart of the Roman Republic’s turmoil. Plutarch wrote of her “having taught Antony to be so good a servant, he coming to her hands tame and broken into entire obedience to the commands of a mistress. Such being his temper, the last and crowning mischief that could befall him came in the love of Cleopatra, to awaken and kindle to fury passions that as yet lay still and dormant in his nature, and to stifle and finally corrupt any elements that yet made resistance in him of goodness and a sound judgment.”
As much as we love to douse our body in floral scents, just like their production of colors, flowers do not pour out their odors for us, but to attract pollinators. Floral scent emissions vary throughout the day, following a circadian rhythm. This variation is controlled by light intensity, and maximal emissions coincide with peaks of the highest activity of visiting pollinators. Scent emissions also depend on the flower’s fecundity and reduces after pollination. Tropical orchids terminate their scents immediately after pollination in order to save energy spent on fragrance production. Flowers produce a variety of scents to attract pollinators whose odor preferences vary, and not all of them are roses and lilies. For example, the titan arum, or corpse flower, emits an overwhelming stench of rotting flesh in order to attract beetles and flies. Even the scents we love can include the “dirty” notes. Jasmine, for example, produces indole and skatole compounds, which are prominent in animal feces. A study done by neurobiologists at the University of Oxford found participants rating jasmine scent with indole even more pleasant than one without, suggesting the unpleasant element in a complex odor mixture to be the attention getter that strengthens and prolongs the overall sensation. It would also explain why we find notes such as cat-pee and sweat in cheese and wine to be appealing.
One of the fascinating aspects about wine is that their flavors are much more interesting than those from their fruits. While grape juice tastes generically fruity, wine pushes floral aromas, exudes honey and caramel notes, and recalls grapes ripening on the vine under the warm sun. It’s all thanks to specific strains of yeasts digesting the fruit sugar, releasing alcohol, carbon dioxide, and ripe fruit and floral volatiles in the process. Studies have noted that single-cell yeast separated from the rest of the fungi kingdom around 300 million years ago, after the occurrence of insects, but well before flowers. That all yeast species attract fruit flies suggests that their symbiotic bond may contribute to the evolution of insect mediated pollination in plants, and that flowers may emit insect-attracting scents because the yeasts had done it first.
For most of us, our olfactory organs have not adapted to dissect a complex scent. As humans are visual creatures, domesticated flowers accordingly are improved upon appearances and long vase life. Because scent volatiles, which share resources with pigment molecules, are also plant hormones that shorten vase life, flowers lose their scents in the quest for an ever lasting striking appearance. Yet, like the perfumer and the sommelier, it is also possible to improve upon our nose. And when we open up our nose, may we delight in the wonder of a new world. To mark the tail of spring, the dress is molded from two cotton squares of brightly colored floral prints. Its tail is a silk rectangle, which comes from a vintage sari embellished with silver zari work.
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