Geoffrey Grigson might have started it. Inside the Englishman’s Flora for the 1950s he told how a French (who else?) placed branches of hawthorn beyond your windows each and every young woman. “The stale, sweet fragrance through the triethylamine the plants have makes them suggestive of sex.”
Richard Mabey picks this up inside the current Flora Britannica, where he describes that “the triethlyamine in charge of the element that is stale hawthorn’s complicated scent is amongst the very very very first chemicals produced whenever living muscle begins to decay” and reminds nurses that have worked in Africa of this odor of gangrene.
“Yet triethylamine’s fishy scent,” he continues on, “is additionally the odor of intercourse – one thing rarely acknowledged in folklore, but implicit in a lot of the popular tradition associated with the hawthorn.”
Charles Nelson, later of our nationwide Botanic Gardens, believes that botanists “never agree about perfumes”. The Burren’s fragrant orchid, Gymnadenia conopsea, as an example, has plants that, for him, are perfumed with vanilla. “Others assert that the fragrance resembles cloves or plastic, which reminds me personally regarding the equation of old socks or fine old hock for the perfume associated with Ca tree poppy – an aroma is really as much when you look at the brain as beauty is within the eye associated with beholder.”
But also he finds that hawthorn blossom “exudes that hefty musky scent with intimate undertones”. He could be, needless to say, another Englishman, now staying in pastoral bliss in Tippitiwichet Cottage, someplace in East Anglia.
So, aided by the hawthorn hedges associated with acre weighed straight straight down with quite unforgettable swags of snowy plants, the Vineys sought out for the sniff – also a few deep breaths. Continue reading
