THE PERFUMIER AND THE STINKHORN
THE PERFUMIER AND THE STINKHORN
SMELL IS A VERY PRIMITIVE SENSE, but we only come to appreciate its subtleties in maturity. When I was a boy, despite my pretensions at being a young naturalist, I needed scents to be outrageous to be memorable. The one that broke through most gloriously was the stinkhorn fungus, its reek of rotting animal unmistakable at twenty yards.
But smells, unlike sights, are hard to describe. They inhabit an evocative, ephemeral space in our imaginations that is difficult to put into words. They can only be described by comparison with other smells. To be fixed in our imaginations they need to be attached to other memories — of place, moment, feeling — and that needs the experience of age. As Marcel Proust, poet laureate of scent and memory, famously wrote: fragrance and flavour ‘bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection’.
I can remember the last throes of the great drought of 1976, and how after three months in the sun we were all as hard-baked as the riverbeds. There was no sap left in anything. The air was scentless — except for that flintiness you sense close to a hot brick wall. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the drought dissolved. September brought torrential rain. It made the pavements steam. It flashed off the parched earth and rushed straight back to the rivers. But some soaked into the ground, enough to start the cycles again. It was an ancient recipe: ‘Dried earth. Just add water’. The next morning when I opened the window the air was full of an extraordinary fragrance that seemed to spark and capture every good memory I had. Seawater drying on skin. The chanterelles my friend Richard used to send me from Scotland in July, packed in moss. My dad painting the garden fence with creosote in autumn. A whiff of burned rubber on a summer street. All these deeply personal and emotional recollections from the simple exhalation that follows a shower of rain on dry earth.
But it’s a real enough aroma. It’s called ‘petrichor’, the essence of stone, and it is all the things that you imagine it to be. From fallen flower petals, flakes of oak-moss, pollens and resins and desiccated mushrooms, a huge ensemble of perfumed essences is washed into the ground and absorbed by porous stones and clay. When warm rain falls again, they’re released back into the air to rekindle our memories of their ingredients.
The puzzle is why we are all still so good at scents, despite their having little relevance to our survival, and why they are so linked with emotion. These days I find that I partly navigate my way through the year by scents, and that they unlock memories that I sometimes didn’t know I had, my own ‘vast structure of recollection’.
The first fragrant wild flower of the year is spurge laurel, with tiny green flowers in late January that smell, as many early spring blooms do, of snow and honey, a lure for early insects that still hints of the torpor of the hibernating months. But my real trigger is moschatel, in March. The first time I sniffed its diminutive five-faced flowers I was astonished to smell my first girlfriend. As a naïve sixteen-year-old I never knew what to make of this earthy musk and almond aroma on such an unearthly creature, and assumed it was some expensive perfume. Now, probably only slightly wiser, moschatel still transports me to those breathless clinches with Liz, and leaves me wondering about the strange evolutionary pathways that link the scent of a spring flower with a pubescent girl. Bluebells are even more sultry. In small numbers, I love the spicy, liliaceous overtone in their scent. But en masse, I find them almost narcotic, a heavy haze that catches the throat — or maybe, if I’m honest, makes me feel too nostalgically smothered by memories of a childhood spent in the woods. Then there is the scent of burnet roses, like warm cream, irrevocably linked for me with the limestone hills of the Burren, and my dear late friend Tony Evans, taking his exquisite photograph of their petals floating in a rock-pool.
Summer’s smells are less emotionally intense, the perfumes of pure pleasure. The scent of crushed wormwood, or any member of the artemisia family, takes me in a flash to the north-Norfolk saltmarshes, where the bracing tang of sea-wormwood blends with the wind and the calls of curlews, and where I first had a house of my own. Meadowsweet is the signature scent of my new home in south Norfolk, a ubiquitous, astringent fragrance that rises up wherever you walk in a damp place, whether it’s a fen or roadside ditch. It’s two scents, really: the fishy, sexy, may-like sweetness of the flowers, and the almost medicinal cucumber-and-carbolic of the leaves. Maybe that’s why one of its vernacular names is ‘Courtship and Matrimony’.
And then there’s gorse, or furze, or fuzz, which is in bloom somewhere every month of the year. ‘When gorse is in blossom kissing’s in season’, the old saying goes. Its coconut and peach perfume has been a companion throughout my life, on heaths in the Chilterns and East Anglia, as a background to my first thrilling nightingale songs, as a florid savour in experimental wild salads. But I’ve had another kind of reaction to gorse, one that has nothing to do with memories. It’s a June afternoon, and I’m lying on my back on a patch of heath. The gorse and broom flower-sprays are hanging like garlands against the sky. The smell is tropical — vanilla and melon are there along with coconut. Out of the blue, I’m hit by an extra burst of scent. It seems to fill not just my nose, but my eyes and cheeks. I wonder for a moment if a breeze has got up, but it’s a day of dead calm. A few minutes later it happens again, and I recall noticing these rhythmic gusts with other kinds of flower — lilacs, lime blossom, viburnums. I wonder if it’s a kind of olfactory illusion, a momentary dulling of attention. Something in me, not the plant. Violets do this because of a chemical called ionone, which briefly anaesthetises our scent buds. The flower itself continues to smell but we lose the ability to register it. Then a couple of minutes later, the nose recovers and the scent reappears. Or is it that some plants budget their precious scent molecules, emitting concentrated puffs as comeons to insects? Then I have a more outlandish thought. Does the gorse smell me, and know there is a living thing near it? Is it directing its fragrant come-ons my way?
This was an outrageously egocentric notion, but not out of the question. Natural smells are not just random chemical emissions. They’re part of a complex messaging system between plant and plant, animal and plant. Rats emit an airborne chemical signal — a pheromone — when they’re afraid, which turns on a natural analgesic in other rats in the vicinity, to prepare them for pain. When oak leaves are seriously munched by insects they emit another pheromone, which promotes the production of extra tannin in neighbouring trees, and makes their leaves more bitter to marauders. Mopane trees in Africa, a favourite food of elephants, do the same, and send out warning messages to other trees when they’re being browsed. The elephants are wise to this trick. They eat only a few leaves from each tree, and move upwind to new trees. ‘We can’t hear the trees calling to each other,’ wrote Colin Tudge, ‘but the air is abuzz with their conversations none the less, conducted in vaporous chemistry.’
The reason we know so much about scents that we ourselves can’t smell is thanks to a piece of technology invented by James Lovelock, proponent of the Gaia hypothesis. This suggests that communication between all things on earth is so interconnected that the planet itself is tantamount to a single organism. In the 1960s Lovelock developed an instrument called the electron capture detector, which is able to detect minute traces of chemical, especially in the air. He has one in his home, where he practices science as — in his words — ‘a cottage industry’. I visited him there once, and he warned me that a puff of deodorant at the other end of the house could ruin the readings.
It’s been this instrument which has revealed that fruit flies will respond to as little as one hundred-millionth of a gram of pheromone produced by Cassia plants, and that lima beans affected by spider mite give off a volatile chemical in minute concentrations that attracts another species of predatory mite that feeds on the original mites. It has helped to untangle the extraordinary lifecycle of the large blue butterfly, whose larvae feed on wild thyme and produce honey from their abdomens. They also generate a pheromone that mimics the scent of ant grubs. The adult ants are attracted to this scent, gather up the butterfly larvae and take them back to their nests, looking after them as if they were their own offspring. All the while the larvae are singing to the ants, echoing the rhythmic noises of their grubs. Electron capture detection is also helping that gravely threatened creature, the bee. Honey-bees are able to read and interpret the chemical cues diffused into the atmosphere over a range of forty square kilometres, and convey the information back to other bees from their colony. But we now know that residues in the exhausts of cars using lead-free petrol react with the odour molecules from flowers, making them indecipherable to bees. This may be one of the causes of the now widespread problem of sudden hive collapse.
Smell isn’t the oldest sense. The earliest cells must have first acquired an ability to orientate themselves in space and respond to warmth. But the identification of food and the necessity of interacting with other organisms entailed the development of this chemical messaging system, and we’ve inherited it. Long before we began to register scents consciously our behaviour was being guided by them. They helped with finding a mate and bonding with children and tribe, with locating food and avoiding danger, with interpreting the weather and the comings and goings of other creatures. The smell receptors were the foundations of the limbic system, a primitive centre concerned with basic emotions and the recording of sensation, and it was round this that the apparatus of memory began to evolve. Our brains are outgrowths of our noses. No wonder that smells remain the great carriers and triggers of potent memories. Smell and memory are both processed in the same ancient areas of our brains.
In Patrick Susskind’s black and nose-gripping fantasy Perfume, the hero is a man born with no personal odour whatsoever. But he has an exquisite sense of smell, which leads him to become a supreme concoctor of perfumes. His lack of any personal scent disturbs other people, so he devises fragrances to make him socially acceptable — an ‘odour of inconspicuousness’, a hint of new-born baby, and eventually a scent so irresistible that it attracts a mob, who eat him alive in an ecstatic frenzy.
We’re still part of the planet’s buzzing chemical conversation. Although sight is now overwhelmingly our most important sense, we have five million scent receptors in our noses and three thousand genes encoded for smells, as against just three for perception of colour. And though it matters not a jot to our survival, we can still sniff the difference, with our eyes shut, between gin and whisky, roses and lilac, curry and stew, bluebells and balsam. The great American biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas had a vision of the entire planet self-regulated by its smells: ‘In this immense organism, chemical signs might serve the function of global hormones, keeping balance and symmetry in the operation of various interrelated working parts, informing tissues in the vegetation of the Alps about the state of eels in the Sargasso Sea, by long, interminable relays of interconnected messages between all kind of other creatures.’ And we’re informed too, still kept in touch with our love affairs and heydays by the scents carried on the wind.
