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Why and how flowers smell
- It's not your imagination: most commercial roses smell
less. Lavender-colored roses are the exception for now. The lack of smell
in roses is the outcome of a push for long-lasting, brightly colored roses.
- One of the reasons roses are smelling less sweet is that
breeders are focused on 26 traits, none of them smell. According to breeder
John Dolan, "roses per bush, vase life, color, form, thorns"
are all more important commercial characteristics.
- Since making scent demands a lot of metabolic energy
from a flower, long-lasting flowers might be taking energy away from their
scent making.
- Flowers smells are plant survival traits. Terpenes, the
chemical compounds that make basil and juniper smell the way they do,
discourage herbivores from eating the stems of the plants, while attracting
pollinators to their flowers. Citrusy limonene is the terpene that gives
lavender its scent. It's also an antibacterial agent.
- If you want flowers that smell, you're better off sticking
to growing your own blooms.
- Snapdragons have very simple smell mechanisms--only three
components contribute to their scent, just compare that to an orchid's
one hundred components.
- The way each flower in a variety has its own smell is
by changing the proportion of its odor components, thought the number
of components will be shared by the variety.
-The compound indol in strong concentration smells like
sewage, but its low concentration is "a key component of jasmine."
Many of the worst smells we experience as humans can be pleasant in very
low concentrations.
- The way a flower smells changes over its lifespan-scents
are produced and then fade at different rates over the days the flower
is blooming.
- University professors are trying to isolate the genes
that contribute to flowers smelling like flowers, so flower growers can
reintroduce the genes, there's also the possibility that they will give
scent to odorless blooms, or offer the possibility of new smells for familiar
flowers.
Written and researched by Sylvie Beauvais, Philadelphia, PA
Adapted from Jonathan Knight, "Aroma therapy." New Scientist,
February 12, 2000.
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