Abandoning All Common Scents
How did all these stinky plants get into our gardens? I’m talking about malodorous things like that current darling of West Coast designers, the striking, silver-leaved honey bush, Melianthus major . Elegant foliage, yes, and very interesting flowers, but whoa what an odor.
Brush against this beauty and you’ll want to move it a little further from the garden path. It’s like growing dirty socks in your garden.
I’m told that the most popular plant at the UCI Botanic Garden sales doesn’t smell like a bed of roses either. It’s a plectranthus named P. ciliatus ‘Kirstenbosch’, but “that’s nothing, you should smell P. neochilis ,” said nursery manager Laura Lyons. “I call it the skunk plant,” and it’s been banished from the garden’s beds it’s so “skunky.”
On a list of plectranthus grown at this Orange County garden, no less than nine new kinds--some of which are showing up at nurseries--have some mention of an unpleasant odor, from “faint” to “very strong.” P. zuluensis is one of the most foul, yet is also one of the most common at nurseries. Why anyone would plant it is beyond me.
And we shouldn’t forget the phenomena of the corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanum , blooming at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino two years ago. This is when about 76,000 crazed fans stood in line for hours to catch the stench of rotting meat coming from its huge flower.
Am I missing something here? What happened to redolent and fragrant? What’s this stink about?
Ron Vanderhoff, the nursery manager at popular Roger’s Garden, pointed out that it’s not just a few newcomers that smell bad. Society garlic, Tulbaghia violacea , for example, has been around for years and is one of the most common plants in our landscape. Its foliage smells really bad and comparing the scent of true garlic to the malodorous society garlic is probably libelous.
In front of this Corona del Mar nursery there is a planting of a pretty variegated horehound , Ballota nigra , and Vanderhoff told me that customers frequently walk in with a leaf, asking if the nursery carries this plant. “We do, but first we crush a leaf so they can smell it,” said Vanderhoff. “It smells just like dirty socks, but people still buy it.” Go figure.
“It does make a nice little spreading ground cover,” he added, which is why stinky things get planted at all--they have some other redeeming quality, which, come to think of it, is also why people put up with blue cheese.
Vanderhoff introduced me to a gardener who actually goes out of his way to collect smelly plants, which must be a first. If it doesn’t stink, he ain’t interested.
In his Mission Viejo garden, Richard Barto has all kinds of “pungent plants,” as he calls them, but especially the tropical kinds that smell like rotting meat, similar to the Huntington’s amorphophallus. “When Richard worked here [he’s now with Village Nurseries in Orange], he used to bring one in every now and then so we could smell it,” said Vanderhoff. “They were pretty awful.”
Barto, 23, first became interested in a group of plants commonly called Dutchman’s pipe vines, Aristolochia , which are native to the Americas, from California’s chaparral to Brazil’s amazonia, and have beautiful flowers. He soon found that many of them smelled like rotting meat. He even found dead flies trapped inside the flowers of some.
He listed Aristolochia gigantea , A. gigantiflora , A. grandiflora , and A. ringens as having flowers that smell particularly bad. A. grandiflora is so strong “you should smell it for only a few seconds,” warned Barto, talking about the smell as if it were radioactivity.
This led him to look for other smelly plants, and in no time he had a collection of about 20 kinds. He thought, “Now this is kind of different.” A graduate of the Saddleback College horticulture certificate program, he has even traveled to Costa Rica to see them growing in the wild.
Dracunculus vulgaris is a notable stinker in his collection. It looks vaguely like a purple calla lily but smells like a corpse flower. I once made the embarrassing mistake of planting one in my garden just outside the bathroom window, though it did not stay there for long. I can still remember walking into the bathroom the day it first bloomed, wondering what was wrong with the plumbing.
Barto has even found a stinky indoor plant. Called the velvet plant ( Gynura sarmentosa ), it has lovely, velvety-purple leaves, but the dandelion-like flowers smell really bad. It is commonly suggested that the buds be pinched off before they bloom, but Barto disagrees. Savor the smell, he said, only half-kidding. There are also stinky bulbs in his collection. The flowers on a eucomis “smell like boiled cabbage.”
The various Stapelia and Huernia species make up a large part of Barto’s unusual collection. These are succulents with strange--Barto calls them “gorgeous”--fleshy flowers that lie on the ground like old liver, flies buzzing overhead.
Complex chemistry generates the putrid-smelling flowers. Disdaining honey bees, these plants want to attract the more common fly as a pollinator, or perhaps tropical dung beetles.
Nature’s reason for really stinky foliage is less clear. One of the real stinkers in this respect is Clerodendron bungei , another I have firsthand experience with.
I planted one in the backyard under a big tabebuia tree near the patio.
I bought it at the Huntington plant sale and figured the bothersome smell in the vicinity of this plant was probably coming from all those frantic, sweaty shoppers.
After all, the common name of “Cashmere bouquet” would suggest that this plant was fragrant, not fetid. The flowers are fragrant, it turns out, but the leaves stink.
Had I known its other, older botanic name was C. foetidum , I would not have bought it since anything named foetidum or fetidus usually smells bad.
But too late, it’s planted and every now and then while sitting on the patio in summer (thankfully it is leafless in winter), I can smell that armpit odor, a reminder that someday I must get rid of this plant, however interesting or pretty its flowers may be.
Even a few of our own California native plants are fusty or rank, and, again, I have a story about planting one in the wrong place.
Having long admired on hikes the pretty yellow flowers and puffy seed pods of the native bladderpod, I planted several beside a path at a former home in Pacific Palisades.
I noticed a slightly noisome odor while I was putting them in, but it became really objectionable as they grew and it became impossible not to brush against them while walking down that path. It was either take them out (which I did) or never walk down that path again.
Or maybe I could have sold one to Barto. I don’t think I spotted any in his collection. He might have appreciated their particular bouquet.
