My OperaJasmin Flower
Thursday, September 7, 2006 6:36:41 PM
Flowers: Color and Fragrance - A Folk View
The most fragrant flowers are usually white. Some of my favorite white flowers are frescia, magnolia, orange blossom, nicotina, gardenia and white rose.
What nature sacrifices in color is traded for lush and delicious fragrance that pleases other faculties beyond the eye. Scent and sensation are two words so close in sound yet the sense of scent is so overlooked.
Watch an animal follow a dog or cat and notice how it sees, with its nose.
The faculty of smell is related to taste. It was formerly believed that the sense of smell was derived from taste buds concentrated in our nose. In fact there are more olfactory cells than taste buds called gustatory nerve cells. While there about 10,000 taste buds on the tongue there are about 40 million olfactory receptors in humans and 2 billion in a dog. Now it is known that t the olfactory and gustatory cell have different brain receptors and travel different neural paths. For a good explantion of the physiology of tast and smell see Chapter 10 in The Nervous System In Action by Michael D. Mann, Ph.D. http://www.unmc.edu:80/Physiology/Mann/
What a divergent path from fragrant flowers to physiology; from folk knowledge to genome. What's next, Faires?
After the white flowers purple ones tend to be more fragrant.
The Seasons of Color
The flowers seem to bloom in an orderly sequence by color. There is an early purple phase in spring. For instance think of the lilacs bursting out in the third week of May. Surely the yellow dafoddils and multi-colored tulips follow but there is generally a dominant color among wild flowers as the summer proceeds. After purple the dominant shade is red or pink as when the roses bloom followed by oranges with lilies and columbine. Finally the golden yellow mums of fall signal the end of the seasons of color.
The most fragrant flowers are usually white. Some of my favorite white flowers are frescia, magnolia, orange blossom, nicotina, gardenia and white rose.
What nature sacrifices in color is traded for lush and delicious fragrance that pleases other faculties beyond the eye. Scent and sensation are two words so close in sound yet the sense of scent is so overlooked.
Watch an animal follow a dog or cat and notice how it sees, with its nose.
The faculty of smell is related to taste. It was formerly believed that the sense of smell was derived from taste buds concentrated in our nose. In fact there are more olfactory cells than taste buds called gustatory nerve cells. While there about 10,000 taste buds on the tongue there are about 40 million olfactory receptors in humans and 2 billion in a dog. Now it is known that t the olfactory and gustatory cell have different brain receptors and travel different neural paths. For a good explantion of the physiology of tast and smell see Chapter 10 in The Nervous System In Action by Michael D. Mann, Ph.D. http://www.unmc.edu:80/Physiology/Mann/
What a divergent path from fragrant flowers to physiology; from folk knowledge to genome. What's next, Faires?
After the white flowers purple ones tend to be more fragrant.
The Seasons of Color
The flowers seem to bloom in an orderly sequence by color. There is an early purple phase in spring. For instance think of the lilacs bursting out in the third week of May. Surely the yellow dafoddils and multi-colored tulips follow but there is generally a dominant color among wild flowers as the summer proceeds. After purple the dominant shade is red or pink as when the roses bloom followed by oranges with lilies and columbine. Finally the golden yellow mums of fall signal the end of the seasons of color.
