What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [17]
Smellscape in a Bottle
John Muir experienced an olfactory epiphany on the upper reaches of California’s Feather River. For a few minutes the smellscape of the Sierra foothills revealed itself to him in all its swirling splendor.
The air was steaming with fragrance, not rising and wafting past in separate masses, but equally diffused throughout all the wind. Pine woods are at all times fragrant, but most in spring when putting out their tassels, and in warm weather when their gums and balsams are softened by the sun. The wind was now chafing their needles, and the warm rain was steeping them. Monardella grows here in large beds, in sunny openings among the pines; and there is plenty of bog in the dells, and manzanita on the hill-sides; and the rosy fragrant-leaved chamaebatia carpets the ground almost everywhere. These with the gums and balsams of the evergreens formed the chief local fragrance-fountains within reach of the wind.
Muir’s image of fragrance fountains is wonderful, yet his dry references to Latin scientific names make us thirst for a more compelling description. Take the large beds of Monardella, for example; what does it smell like? Monardella belongs to the mint family. Given the locale, Muir was probably describing coyote mint (M. villosa) or pennyroyal (M. odoratissima). I have hiked through ground covered in California pennyroyal and inhaled the fresh fragrance rising from the bruised leaves beneath my boots. Muir’s description of “rosy fragrant-leaved Chamaebatia” leads one to imagine a pleasing floral scent, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Chamaebatia is a member of the rose family, but the plant he smelled (C. foliolosa) is unique to California. Its leaves are dull green feathery fronds, sticky with resin, and it sports tiny white flowers. The Miwok Indians called it kit-kit-dizze, but the settlers knew it as “Sierra Mountain Misery” or “Bearclover,” names that reflect its pervasive, heavy aroma, akin to cooked artichokes or dilute cat urine. On a hot day in the Sierra Nevada, this musty smell rises like a tide and covers the land all the way from the Feather River where Muir inhaled it, past Lake Tahoe, down to Yosemite and to the southern foothills in Tulare County.
If only Muir’s prose were as aromatic as his visual images. He rouses our curiosity, but can’t sate it. We want to sniff. We want to dip a cup in the showering fragrance fountain. Why can’t someone give us Muir’s afternoon on the Feather River?
FOR NEARLY ALL of human history, capturing a scent from nature meant collection and extraction. Heaps of flower petals and baskets of resin were gathered and their essence stripped out with heat or solvents. The result of this harsh processing may be beautiful on its own, but it is a distorted and distant version of the original. The recent quiet revolution in technical chemistry has changed the way we capture scent, in addition to helping us understand its components. By the mid-1970s, GC/MS technique had become so sensitive that the amount of sample required for analysis was 10 to 50 micrograms, an incredibly small quantity. As my former colleague the Swiss fragrance chemist Roman Kaiser describes it, this is “approximately the amount given off by a moderately fragrant flower over the course of one hour.” Kaiser and a few other experts developed nondestructive means of collecting scent. They take it from the air (or “headspace”) surrounding the sample. Whether it’s an orchid on the vine or a fruit on the