Why Roses Smell Nice
worldsensorium.com
worldsensorium.com
It's really a puzzle. Why on earth should Homo Sapiens consider a rose's smell to be 'nice'? Dogs like roses' smell about the same as shit. They don't give a damn.
Further, why are rainbows pretty? Why is a waterfall inspiring? And on and on.
You have to have some kind of special model to explain this, I think. Something beyond simple reproductive survival. But I don't know what.
Anyway, interesting that we all smell slightly differently! So indeed qualia is a bigger issue than we may have thought.
If one such characteristic is pleasant smell (and why would it not be), then the answer is obvious. By and large, roses smell nice because human bred them to.
That theory seems unlikely to me since wild roses smell good.
I would say that the modern roses that don't smell good have instead lost their smell because they were selected on other criteria.
While not a hard and fast rule, most plant species with strongly scented flowers usually are white (jasmine, gardenia, etc.) and pollinated by nocturnal animals like moths and bats. (A great counter-example is corpse flowers, which use scent to attract a completely different guild of pollinators).
They typically line the roads where the grass is short and are referenced by settlers when they first came to the area in the 1860s
There are many others of interest. Roses of course but also violet, lavender, lilac, lily, hyacinth, osmanthus, mimosa, marigold, chrysanthemum, chamomile, geranium, carnation. You might count iris, but moreso the tuber than the flower.
I walked through smelling every unique type of rose flower and I was surprised to learn that the vast majority do not smell like “roses”!
A rough estimate was that half smell bad or not at all, most of the rest smell like lemons, and a few percent only have the prototypical rose smell.
I have a 'Honey Perfume' that smells nice, but most of the other varieties I have only have very faint scents.
[0] https://www.promessedefleurs.com/rosiers/rosiers-parfumes.ht...
I do smell perfume from certain roses trees as well as does my GF and the roses gardener in this beautiful place [0]. Don’t think smelling roses perfume is a rare condition. Also you probably already know that food additives and ambiance perfumes smells roses like a banana candy taste banana.
I wish you success in your search.
[0] https://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr/en/collections/present...
I have bought almost every kind of varietal I can lay my hands on in an attempt to find roses with scent for my wife's birthday for 20+ years now. When I started doing this, it was easy to find varietals with scent--some of them would pump the whole house full of it they were so strong. In the last 5 years, even if I buy a scattering of varietals (generally I will buy 4-6 dozens in an attempt to find one), I have come up empty twice.
If, however, I go to something like the Del Mar fair and examine the roses which are called "fragrant", they actually are.
I'll leave the conclusions to you.
The problem is apparently that some enzyme that makes scent also tends to break down the flower. So, the "lifetime" of a cut rose is inversely dependent upon the volume of scent.
And, since everything is shipped around the world from the absolute lowest cost area, "lifetime" becomes the only goal with everything else being secondary.
Thus, we have roses with no scent.
I find that scents don't last too long, but I think this is to be expected. On my property most of the scent from roses is produced in the first week's bloom before dissipating.