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Just a little post today so anybody who wants to catch up on yesterday's invasive species post can do so before tomorrow's invasive species post.
We have a small patch of Convallaria in the back yard; it came with the house. I've heard things described as smelling like lily of the valley all my life, but had never (as far as I can recall) smelled the actual flower, so the information didn't really have any meaning for me. (I'm the same way about honeysuckle -- people say things smell like it, but I don't actually have a mental reference for that, never having knowingly smelled honeysuckle.) Now that I have smelled lily of the valley flowers . . . well, it's a "nice" smell, I guess. I would describe them as smelling like soap. Basically.
I bet honeysuckle probably smells like soap too.
I'm more a fan of the leaves than the flowers. By the end of the summer, they look a little ratty, but I like the bright green in the spring, and the perfectly parallel veins. As a bonus, they're really excellent for transmitted light photos. 
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Pretty picture: Convallaria majalis
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8 comments:
Lily of the Valley always smelled like "dove" soap to me. Honeysuckle smells sweet. Sickeningly sweet...
Honeysuckle definitely doesn't smell like soap. Floral honey is accurate, very sweet. Tastes very good too, use to suck the flowers as a child.
I agree- Honeysuckle smells almost like White Shoulders (but less cloying and musky). I like it, though. It makes an excellent adjunct to mead brewing.
Ho ho - perhaps it's really that soap is made to small like Lily of the valley - ???
Sue Swift:
Well, yes (apparently lily-of-the-valley smell -- as the proprietary chemicals Mayol and Florol -- is both cheap and relatively stable, chemically, so it can be used in all kinds of things, soap being among them). Though it'd be interesting if we could do it the other way around -- make flowers that smell like bleach, for example. Or new car smell.
Those citronella geraniums smell like bleach/pinesol - is that good enough?
I don't remember getting a bleach smell off of them, though admittedly it's been a long time since I last smelled one.
Different species of honeysuckle have different fragrances. The species people are talking about is probably the highly invasive climbing Japanese honyesuckle (Lonicera japonica), which has a very strong sweet and somewhat heavy smell, one which most people enjoy, though I can understand why some might find it sickly or cloying. The shrub honeysucke L. fragrantissima has a fragrance very close to that of orange blossoms, a light sweet fragrance everyone seems to like (It's one of my personal all-time top favorites among scented plants.) All the other shrub honeysuckles I know are unscented. And the European woodbine (L. periclymenum), though the scent is different still, is also pleasantly and sweetly fragrant.
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