RECENTLY, I was taking a group of college pupils out on a
bit of a tree-identification ramble. A simple ramble where I was running through some of the basic features to look out for in order to put a name to some of our more common woodland and hedgerow trees –a skill that, while being rather fundamental for all sorts of practical reasons, develops yet another reassuring familiarity and connection with our environment. You may never need to make clogs or a piling for a pier, or collect nuts or make jam, but to know that alder is the best rot-proof wood, that hazel is the tastiest nut, and that wild damsons are the ingredient for a tasty wild jam or gin, all helps with giving us yet another dimension to a walk and another link to our heritage. A familiarity that breeds intimacy, from which a love and appreciation is born – like all good relationships. Knowing your trees gives you clues to the geology beneath your feet, the historic use of the land and the other kinds of plants and animals that you might find in the vicinity. While exploring the trees as we passed them, up came a very poignant point.
I had in front of me an elder tree. It was just coming into leaf, its purple leaves pushing bud scales aside. Like so many of their demographic (a recent survey came to the conclusion that 98 per cent of us Brits cannot identify five common tree species), these boys didn’t know their oaks from their aspens. This elder was just as strange to them. So I began to explain and pick my way through the distinctive features.
It was, I thought, going well. I had just demonstrated the pith-filled stems which could be fashioned into whistles and pea shooters; confident that I now had their attention, I carried on and then I took a leaf and crushed it and explained how easy it was to identify the tree by smell alone. I had lost them. The fact that its leaves smell sour and acrid when bruised didn’t help. ‘It smells of wee,’ someone added helpfully.
Why is smelling flowers acceptable but leaning in to smell a leaf for the most part is a bit weird? After all, those with a culinary bent will do exactly this with herbs and spices, as a way of assessing their use and suitability in creating a flavoursome dish.
With the smell of the elder firmly in nostril, it got me thinking. Just the smell of this tree reminds me of so many things – wine and foraging, badgers, garden fires, rainy summer days, moth trapping on the roof of my dad’s garage. The pungent elder leaf somehow had the power to link so many aspects of my life in one sniff, a web of seemingly disjointed and varied experiences all connected by the smell or smells of a single tree.
The elder is the tree of three, three smells, that is – the light, dusty and gentle smell of the flowers in the spring, the rich, sweet, sugary, boozy one of the berries in late summer, and, of course, the ubiquitous smell of the leaves. Both of the former represent two natural events that occur as discrete moments in the seasonal cycle: clear identification and demarcation of the seasons. You cannot fill bags with the puffy umbels or tubs with the purple finger-staining berries at any other time of the year – they identify a time, and the memory that these smells evoke gives you the place. It’s a deep connection which can be as vivid and clear a reference point as seasonal, very commercial dates in the diary. When you synchronise with these rhythms, you’re connecting in a very intimate, practical and human way.
The stair rods of summer rain seem to agitate the elder in the same way as when you brush past it. Walking along a field margin in a heavy downpour, you’ll smell the elder foliage more than any other. It’s a tree with presence, and it lets you know it is there, even if you’re not looking for it or if it has no flowers or berries to offer you at the time. It was also the only tree available to shelter under on the way back from the beach on our annual family summer holiday; another cluster of reference points for that smell, another memory lodged: the soft, dusty bark adorned with the bright orange lichen and the soft, downy flaps of the jelly ear fungus.
It was an elder that grew behind the single-storey corrugated tin garage, previously a stable building. No doubt deposited there as a seed in the purple dropping of a bird that had perched on the wiggly tin roof edge many years ago. It had grown close to the wall, not big and rooty enough to cause any structural damage, and therefore it had managed to avoid the death warrant of the chainsaw. Because it was growing in the shady waste ground, the no-man’s-land of the garden, it had been left to do its own thing. It was a handy ladder for me to climb up into the roof; its soft, innocuous foliage and multiple branches made it easy to push up through and here was a perfect place to hide out with a clear vista of the garden, and a good spot to place my homemade moth trap – a device akin to a lobster pot for trapping live moths, the bait being an illuminated light bulb. Here under the topmost spread of the elder I would sit with pots, specimen tubes and a copy of Skinner’s Moths of the British Isles and pore through its pages. I even found the cryptic caterpillar of the swallow-tail moth feeding on its leaves.
The stems of an elder can be used as a pipe to blow life into the embers of a fire. The garden ‘burn up’, while frowned upon by the ecological gardeners of today, was a very much looked-forward-to event when I was growing up. The connection between the smells of the bonfire’s wood smoke, of marshmallows and elder, is one derived from the old use of the tree, and one that, possibly, is part of the etymology of the name. ‘Elder’ as a word may well be derived from the Anglo-Saxon word aeld, meaning fire.
All of these experiences and sensory adventures can be conjured up from somewhere deep in my head by just the whiff of those crumpled leaves in my fingers. This is the secret power of smell. More than any other sense, that of olfaction is able to release memories and alter our emotional state. This in itself is a reason to value our senses and the organisms that provide them. These deep-set, multi-sensory connections also have a practical use: they are an aide-mémoire in helping recall natural foodstuffs and plants with handy properties, many of which might still be of value today. However, these skills are slowly being erased and eroded by our less nature-centric commodities and cultures.
The reason for the poignancy of smell and its uncanny ability to reform long-forgotten and deeply buried memories is this: smells are received by the receptors in our nasal passages, the nervous impulses they generate then pass through the olfactory bulb and then straight into the limbic system – the part of the brain that has been shown to be responsible for emotion and long-term memory. It is a short journey directly to a primitive part of the brain, which some call the paleomammalian system – something else we have our early nocturnal tree-living ancestors to thank for.
The ability of a simple smell to trigger a trip down memory lane or even an emotional state is a very powerful tool for those seeking to immerse themselves more fully in the natural world. The power of this ability of smell to alter our emotional state pervades most of our consumer life, so why not also nature, in its raw and original sensory form?
Of course, we can’t end this sensory journey initiated by a tree’s leaves without asking why? Why do elder leaves smell so strongly? The flowers have an odour because, like all flowers, they are designed to be attractive to pollinating insects, the fruit smells to maybe attract mammals such as us to disperse the berries and therefore the seeds with them, the foliage smells because…
Well, it is less than tasty, and while many species will consume the leaves, it is a figure much lower than, say, the leaves of the hawthorn. Toxic substances such as the alkaloid sambucine and a cyanogenic (bonded with cyanide) compound, sambunigrin, are contained within and it’s because of these that it has many traditional uses as an insect deterrent, either as a potion to be topically applied to stave off the attentions of midge, mosquito and horsefly, or simply as a bunch hung from the harnesses of working horses, by the stable door, or planted around the back of the house to deter flies from entering the kitchen and the pantry.
Smell and the forager
Smell has a direct and very pragmatic application too. Just as appearance and sound can be useful in identifying anything from a redstart to a red deer, smell can be used in the identification of many other less-than-extravert species.
Carbolic, sulphuric, milky, aniseed, goaty, rotten meat, as well as coal gas, garlic, nail-varnish remover, public swimming pools, potato peelings, hen houses, Russian leather, rubber, even the smell of sperm and harlots have all been used to describe and help identify different species of mushroom.
Many wild-food foragers love the idea of mushrooms, and as far as sustainable meals and wild foods go they tick many boxes. However, in a world where all the difficult decisions are made for us, the supermarket shelf seems a safer bet. In the mushroom world, the difference between dinner and fatal poison comes down to how a fungus smells. As with much foraging, there is nothing like the focus of possible death or a very unpleasant bout of stomach cramps to make you pay attention to the details.
I do encourage foraging for this reason; it gives you a reason to get it right. In some ways it reminds me of my Alaskan bear, we all need a bit of jeopardy in our lives and if we can cheat it, or develop a skill that allows us to work through such challenges, it brings with it a genuine sense of satisfaction that is hard to beat.
Incidentally, some of the best eating mushrooms to be found in the wild are members of the agaric family, but it contains quite a few that look very similar to each other, and that includes some poisonous ones. You have to be able to tell them apart if you’re going to consume them. How they smell, combined with other features – size, shape, habitat, bruising and growth form – can help you make decisions with confidence. In general, I tend to use smell last; if they tick all the other boxes and smell of aniseed, or smell mushroomy, then I’m pretty sure I’m safe, but if they smell of soap, chemicals or a bit inky, then I need to go back and check the details. The chances are I’ve made an error and I’ll not be taking a bite.