The last-named, horned bladderwort, is perhaps the most fragrant
flower we have. In a warm, moist atmosphere, its odor is almost too
strong. It is a plant with a slender, leafless stalk or scape less
than a foot high, with two or more large yellow hood or helmet shaped
flowers. It is not common, and belongs pretty well north, growing in
sandy swamps and along the marshy margins of lakes and ponds. Its
perfume is sweet and spicy in an eminent degree. I have placed in the
above list several flowers that are intermittently fragrant, like the
hepatica, or liver-leaf. This flower is the earliest, as it is
certainly one of the most beautiful, to be found in our woods,
and occasionally it is fragrant. Group after group may be
inspected--ranging through all shades of purple and blue, with some
perfectly white--and no odor be detected, when presently you will
happen upon a little brood of them that have a most delicate and
delicious fragrance. The same is true of a species of loosestrife
growing along streams and on other wet places, with tall bushy stalks,
dark green leaves, and pale axillary yellow flowers (probably
European). A handful of these flowers will sometimes exhale a sweet
fragrance; at other times, or from another locality, they are
scentless. Our evening primrose is thought to be uniformly
sweet-scented, but the past season I examined many specimens, and
failed to find one that was so. Some seasons the sugar maple yields
much sweeter sap than in others; and even individual trees, owing to
the soil, moisture, etc., where they stand, show a great difference in
this respect. The same is doubtless true of the sweet-scented flowers.
I had always supposed that our Canada violet--the tall, leafy-stemmed
white violet of our Northern woods--was odorless, till a correspondent
called my attention to the contrary fact. On examination I found that,
while the first ones that bloomed about May 25 had very sweet-scented
foliage, especially when crushed in the hand, the flowers were
practically without fragrance. But as the season advanced the
fragrance developed, till a single flower had a well-marked perfume,
and a handful of them was sweet indeed. A single specimen, plucked
about August 1, was quite as fragrant as the English violet, though
the perfume is not what is known as violet, but, like that of the
hepatica, comes nearer to the odor of certain fruit-trees.
It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of our sugar maple are
sweet-scented; the perfume seems to become stale after a few days:
but pass under this tree just at the right moment, say at nightfall on
the first or second day of its perfect inflorescence, and the air is
loaded with its sweetness; its perfumed breath falls upon you as its
cool shadow does a few weeks later.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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