There is great excitement at the Adelaide Botanic Garden in South Australia. For the first time in a decade, the corpse flower is in bloom.
It must be said that the attractions of the corpse flower are not all that obvious. Other flowers – rose, lily, sweet pea, jasmine, gardenia, freesia – look beautiful and smell lovely.
But the poor corpse flower looks vast and wild, as if it had been hastily drawn with purple and green hair tips by a bad-tempered child. Even worse, it smells – as its name suggests – like a corpse.
Some experts say it carries notes of rotting meat and fermented cheese. Others claim to detect the smell of sour sweat tinged with a strong hint of garlic, fish intestines and rotten eggs. Botanists suggest that it smells very unpleasant to attract the right kind of insect for pollination.
Craig Brown: There is great excitement at the Adelaide Botanic Garden in South Australia. For the first time in a decade, the corpse flower is in bloom
A particularly bizarre clip in Prince Harry’s Wash-A-Thon, Spear, deals with the keen sense of smell displayed by his father, King Charles (pictured together Sept. 19 prior to Queen Elizabeth II’s commissioning service)
Once in bloom, it takes 24 hours for the flower to reach its peak stench—and then, after another 24 hours, it begins to wilt.
This modest window of opportunity explains why gardeners from all over Australia flock to see and smell it. When the corpse flower bloomed at the New York Botanical Gardens, in 2016, 25,000 people joined a waiting list, with another 16 million preferring to keep a safe distance and watch it online.
Why the fan base? Does it have anything to do with nostalgia?
Our Victorian ancestors were accustomed to the smells of smoke, soot, horse manure, rotting rubbish, and the smell of unwashed bodies. Their streets were covered in mud and the rivers flowing through their cities were full of sewage.
But, since that time, our world has become free from unpleasant odors. Just a generation ago, public spaces – pubs, railway cars, offices and airports – reeked above all of tobacco smoke. Nowadays, you don’t smell anything at all, unless you’re making your way to a department store, or through the duty-free area of an airport, in which case you’ll be sent staggering from a strong whiff of belligerent perfume.
Even the pleasant scents seem to have largely disappeared. As a child, I loved walking past a coffee shop on Guildford High Street to catch the delicious aroma of roasting coffee beans.
In a recent volume of Alan Bennett’s memoirs, I was pleased to see that it smelled exactly the same, 20 years ago. He wrote that when he lived there as a child at the end of the war, Guildford was not short of coffeehouses, the most beautiful. . . Corona is down Main Street, with a revolving drum of coffee beans in the window and an intoxicating aroma.
Nowadays there are thousands of other coffeehouses, but the aroma of roasting coffee—always more enticing than the coffee itself—has vanished, never finding its way to our high streets.
Eau Sauvage was also Dior’s first men’s fragrance, being introduced to the market in 1966, the year Charles turned 18, a touching age, when young men are more aware of their personal scents.
But fortunately, there are other scents in the air this week. A particularly bizarre clip in Prince Harry’s snitch, Spear, deals with the keen sense of smell displayed by his father, King Charles.
He was always sniffing things out. Food, roses and our hair. He must have been a bloodhound in another life, Harry remembers, adding, with his trademark: ‘Maybe he took all those long waxes because it was hard to smell anything on his personal scent. or Sauvage. He was throwing things at his cheeks, neck and shirt.
The fragrance has been variously described by its maker, Christian Dior, as “a synonym for absolute elegance in the French manner”, “a symbol of refined taste and refined masculinity” and “a composition of reverent freshness imbued with a sinister elegant spirit”.
Eau Sauvage was also Dior’s first men’s fragrance, being introduced to the market in 1966, the year Charles turned 18, a touching age, when young men are more aware of their personal scents. No wonder, then, if King Charles, like the late Henry Cowper “with the wonderful scent of Brut”, still wanted to “sprinkle it everywhere”.
This, of course, can lead to misunderstandings. In his memoirs, former Home Secretary David Blunkett records parading around the garden at Highgrove, and comments on being able to breathe in the wonderful scent of lavender everywhere they go.
“Foreign Minister,” Prince Charles replies. “I think you’ll find it after my shave.”
