If you’re giving someone Valentine’s Day flowers tomorrow, watch to see the first thing the recipient does with them. Chances are your sweetheart’s nose quickly will be buried in the blooms, anticipating a breath of that sweet floral fragrance we all love in cut flowers.
Chances are also that the anticipation will be bigger than the payoff. Cut flowers have lost much of their fragrance over the past 20 or so years, says Natalia Dudareva, an assistant professor of horticulture and landscape architecture at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. There’s little or no fragrance-related data around from old flowers that would make direct comparisons possible, but Dudareva says the nose knows.
“That smell that people stick their noses into the bouquet to enjoy, it’s something everyone remembers,” she says. “But a lot of them are frustrated when they look for it in flowers you hand them. The smell they think they’re going to get isn’t there.”
Or it’s a weaker version of its former self. The loss or reduction of scent was the gradual byproduct of floral industry researchers focusing on improving flowers’ longevity, color or size, Dudareva says. “It wasn’t on purpose. The breeders did their job making flowers (more like) what we wanted to buy,” she says.
Bill Doeckel backs up Dudareva’s version of events. Doeckel is the marketing director for Ball Horticultural Co., the West Chicago-based firm that produces enormous numbers of garden bedding plants and seed for large-scale growers as well as home gardeners. He notes the ’70s and ’80s, breeders were really focused on production attributes–shelf life, earliness to flower, branching, the kinds of things a grower would be looking for. Obviously, nobody decided to breed out smell, which is an attribute that would be positive for consumers. But it was lost along the way.”
Fragrance, many people in the plant industries realized only after it was nearly gone, is “a very plastic trait. It comes and goes very easily in plants,” says Eran Pichersky, a University of Michigan biology professor.
Many of the plants that are still fragrant may be that way only accidentally. Suzy Bales, the author of a new book called “A Garden of Fragrance” (Regan Books, $27.50), says that although hyacinths and some daffodils and nicotianas still exude heady aromas, “they just happen to have held onto their fragrance while breeders were breeding for other features.”
Plants may drop their scent in a few generations, but for people, the memory of sweet-smelling flowers lingers.
It’s a nearly universal idea, says Alan Hirsch, the neurologist who heads the Smell and Taste Institute in Chicago. Researchers who asked first-graders to name things that smell heard the reply “flowers” most often, Hirsch says. “It’s well-ingrained in our psyches that flowers have a smell and smell good,” Hirsch says. On top of that, one of Hirsch’s studies indicates that when a “mixed floral smell” is in the air, children learn some tasks 17 percent faster.
Nobody needs a study to show that flower scents nourish the spirit as well as the brain. “One of the greatest pleasures that was naturally given to us is the smell of flowers,” Bales says. “It lifts your spirit subtly. It’s a shame that we have gradually tuned it out and replaced it with artificial fragrances.”
Scents and sensibility
Now Dudareva, Pichersky and a few others are riddling through the genetic basis for flower scents, with their eyes on ways to restore lost scent in cut flowers, garden plants and crops (many of which need scent for attracting the pollinators that make good yields possible). Some solutions may entail genetic manipulation, or splicing into one plant the fragrance-related genes of another, more powerfully scented flower, Pichersky says.
But others may be simpler. With snapdragons, for instance, growers may change the schedule of cutting and shipping the flowers. Dudareva explains that flowers emit fragrance when they are ready to be pollinated by whatever insect is supposed to do the job. A snapdragon flower normally is at its peak readiness in the fifth to eighth day it is open.
“But growers cut the (flower cluster) when only one or two flowers are open, and something about cutting them or transporting them keeps the scent from coming out” as vividly as it does from snapdragons that stay in the greenhouse to bloom, she says.
There’s no time line for when the work at Dudareva’s Purdue lab or Pichersky’s in Ann Arbor will hit the greenhouses and jack up the aromatic power of cut flowers. But Ball’s Doeckel says his company and others like it are eager for that day to come. “Without question, we’re hearing a lot more interest in fragrant flowers–cut flowers and garden flowers–from consumers,” he says.
He points to the popularity of butterfly gardens, many components of which are scented flowers, and rose varieties that are heavy on scent. “In the past, scent in the garden was not on people’s radar so much,” Doeckel says.
Hirsch has an intriguing theory on why floral scent didn’t get much attention in the past, and why it’s big again now. Smell is the least practical of the senses; it’s a lot easier to get by in life without the ability to smell than without the ability to see or hear. That’s why enjoying good smells can be seen as indulgent or hedonistic, even sexual, Hirsch says, which often has led to it being repressed. But in today’s more open society, Hirsch observes that it’s OK to enjoy smells.
So go ahead. Stop and smell the flowers. If you can.
TURN UP THE FRAGRANCE
Want to indulge your under-used sense of smell in the garden? Suzy Bales, author of “A Garden of Fragrance” (Regan Books, $27.50) suggests planting these flowers:
– Daffodils. Not all varieties still are fragrant. Bales advises checking catalog copy for any mention of a fragrance. “If it has one, they’re going to be sure to mention it,” she says.
– Nicotianas. The dwarf varieties are mostly fragrance-free, but Bales recommends Nicotiana alata and Nicotiana sylvestris for their fragrance, which gets stronger at night.
– Peonies. Especially older varieties that are not commercial breeds.
– Petunia integrifolia. A species petunia that has small flowers.
– New roses. Such as David Austins and Romanticas (see story on the Gardening page), which have combined modern, less-scented plants with the heavily scented antiques.
— Dennis Rodkin
