If you favor certain plants because of their fragrance, you’re not alone. There are billions and billions of little pollinators in the world who agree with you.
As we all know, the prime directive in nature is to reproduce and let loose on the world more of your own kind.
To this end, those plants that are unable to pollinate themselves have evolved strategies to get someone else to do their work for them.
By setting out a buffet of tasty and nutritious pollen or nectar, the plant can get bees and other pollinators to return again and again to their flowers.
In this way, pollen ends up traveling to other flowers or other parts of the same flower and fertilization can take place.
First the pollinators must be lured to the plant to carry out this task.
To get them there, some plants use color, but a color that attracts specific pollinators for that species.
These colors don’t even have to be viewable by the human eye.
It isn’t uncommon to find Day Glo “landing strips” leading to the stamen or nectar stores on the petals of some plants when viewed under black light.
Other plants use scent. This is especially important for flowers that are pollinated by moths and other night- flying creatures.
To be effective and travel the farthest distance, a scent must be composed of volatile compounds. The molecules in these compounds must be small and light so that they can waft easily through the air.
The same thing that makes lavender essential oil, for example, so fragrant also makes it evaporate if you forget to reseal the bottle
In the same way that different colors attract different pollinators, scents have also co-evolved with wildlife to draw specific creatures in.
Bees like sweet scents and beetles go for spicy or musky scents.
Flies can go for sweet, but they’re wild about the smell of putrefying flesh.
That’s why the corpse flower evolved to smell so dreadful and skunk cabbage packs a wallop.
That and the fact that Mother Nature, I’m convinced, has a sense of humor.
It’s not just the flowers that are making use of volatile compounds.
Fragrance, or the chemicals that create fragrance in some plants’ foliage, can also act as protection against predators because they taste awful or are poisonous.
That’s why you don’t see deer munching on your lavenders, sages or mints.
Unless we’re bee keepers or just love to create excellent habitat for butterflies and other pollinators, we humans are usually drawn to scented plants merely because it’s pleasurable. That in itself is reason enough, I think.
But there’s more to it than that.
The olfactory bulb is closely associated with the parts of the brain that are concerned with memory and emotions.
In fact, it’s been determined the way humans remember something is closely linked to how they were feeling at that moment.
Ever get a whiff of something and you’re immediately transported back in time to your childhood? Psychologists believe this is because we learn to identify most common odors when we’re children and we attach our childhood memories to those smells.
As we grow older and learn to identify more aromas, we continue to attach specific memories to those as well.
Considering how infrequently corpse flowers bloom, I think getting the opportunity to witness such a spectacular sight might make for a wonderful memory.
And just think, you could dredge it up at will if you worked at a rendering plant.
Or maybe you’d rather not.
