What are the scents of the countryside?
May 18, 2014 10:02 PM Subscribe
Every now and then I pass by a yard or walk in the park or woods or drive through the country and smell wonderful plant smells. They are not floral smells but generally come from ground plants or weeds. I plucked a couple of these plants today to try to look them up online, with no luck. I think if a plant smells fantastic then there should be something about it online somewhere, but these do not seem to be herbs that people use, and they are not garden flowers, so for some reason they do not count.
One has three leaves and I found a plant on line called black medic but the leaves are more jagged than the online pictures and the stem is not downy like a site black medic was. Maybe it is black medic anyway, I don't know. But the sites mentioned nothing about black medic smelling good.
The other one smells like butter and has strikingly huge leaves, near the ground. I think I have seen it as a decorative plant, I don't remember if it has a flower.
This is in western PA, on the Summerset former slag heap at Frick Park, so they may have been planted there on purpose to make a meadow environment.
At other times I smell things that are vaguely minty or like cinnamon, or wonderful grassy scents which may simply be hay or alfalfa.
A lot of times you can barely get a scent from an individual plant but if there's a bunch of them growing together they smell wonderful. One thing you can do is break the stem in order to smell the plant.
It seems to me that these type of plant smells are underappreciated, like people can't smell them or don't differentiate them from the general outdoorsy smell on a humid day.
So I was just wondering, what are these plants, and why can't someone make an Internet site that helps people identify fragrant/aromatic wild plants (as opposed to just wild flowers and herbs that people use). I did look at wildflower pics, but the plants I found were not in bloom.
One has three leaves and I found a plant on line called black medic but the leaves are more jagged than the online pictures and the stem is not downy like a site black medic was. Maybe it is black medic anyway, I don't know. But the sites mentioned nothing about black medic smelling good.
The other one smells like butter and has strikingly huge leaves, near the ground. I think I have seen it as a decorative plant, I don't remember if it has a flower.
This is in western PA, on the Summerset former slag heap at Frick Park, so they may have been planted there on purpose to make a meadow environment.
At other times I smell things that are vaguely minty or like cinnamon, or wonderful grassy scents which may simply be hay or alfalfa.
A lot of times you can barely get a scent from an individual plant but if there's a bunch of them growing together they smell wonderful. One thing you can do is break the stem in order to smell the plant.
It seems to me that these type of plant smells are underappreciated, like people can't smell them or don't differentiate them from the general outdoorsy smell on a humid day.
So I was just wondering, what are these plants, and why can't someone make an Internet site that helps people identify fragrant/aromatic wild plants (as opposed to just wild flowers and herbs that people use). I did look at wildflower pics, but the plants I found were not in bloom.
This post was deleted for the following reason: Sorry, but this is basically chat-filter as framed. If you'd like help identifying specific plants, maybe post some photos and people can assist. Or if you'd like recommendations for plant ID sites, you can ask for that, but this is too general. -- taz
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