Pakistan Gardening Forum

the scent is divine and permeates the room

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The fragrance is excellent..

But what makes a flower fragrant? Its tightly closed bud doesn’t treat the senses, nor does its stem. Sometimes the foliage has a lovely fragrance such as that of lavender or allspice but for the fragrance to become activated, the foliage must be rubbed or brushed against. If you notice, you can’t smell a flower until it’s in bloom, and that’s because the petals have tiny little glands called osmophores usually located all over the petal.

Osmophores produce chemical compounds often termed essential and volatile oils. Throughout the flower’s development these oils are manufactured. Once the flower reaches maturity (petals unfurl), the amount of oils present cause the glands to swell and then burst open releasing the oils into the air. This process of mixing the oil and air produces the fragrance.

Now here’s the really cool thing about this phenomena. The glands do not produce just one type of oil. The fragrance we inhale is actually a perfect mixture of different oils. In other words the flower is a master fragrance maker, releasing just the right amount of each oil at a particular moment so when mixed together it creates that flower’s signature scent

Very interesting info. I always wondered about the location the fragrance sources in the flower. You just gave nice term to search for. The fragrance of spider lily is no wonder amazing like a fresh breeze and yet we cannot exactly reproduce the exact fragrance of a flower despite all technological advances.

Thank you Tariq for the information.
Arif

M Farooq wrote:Very interesting info. I always wondered about the location the fragrance sources in the flower. You just gave nice term to search for. The fragrance of spider lily is no wonder amazing like a fresh breeze and yet we cannot exactly reproduce the exact fragrance of a flower despite all technological advances.

Right you are...from phototropism to fragrances.....man is still like a child picking pebbles on the seashore of knowledge

An interesting feature about the flower Hymenocallis is that world's tallest building "Burj-Khalifa" design is inspired by this flower.
www.burjkhalifa.ae/en/TheTower/Design.aspx

The most interesting part is the timing of release of this fragrance, all are at there best at a specific time of the day.
Tariq throw some light on this aspect.

Muhammad Arif Khan wrote:The most interesting part is the timing of release of this fragrance, all are at there best at a specific time of the day.
Tariq throw some light on this aspect.

Sir, in my humble opinion, utilizing the factors affecting evaporation from the high school science and considering that the volatile oils from the osmophores have to finally evaporate into air to produce any kind of scent, time of the day should matter. As humidity, temperature, wind speed would vary throughout the day-night cycle. The book given below however suggests that the subject is a lot more complex.