Since it's down time for rose growing, at least in the colder zones, I figured a more philosophical post might be interesting. I was reading a book called "A Diary of a Rose Lover" by Henri Delbard, of the Delbard rose breeding family, and he had an interesting perspective on fragrance. When he asks himself the question, "Do all roses have a scent?", here is part of his reply:

"Aside from a few rare examples, the answer is yes. All you need is a bit of patience and above all to keep in mind that, like all living things, a rose has an internal clock. That is, it lives by its own rhythm, which depends on the flower's stage of development, the time of day, and the weather conditions. New techniques for analyzing the molecules given off by roses ("head space") have shown that it takes almost twelve hours for a rose to play all its notes. In this way, the intensity as well as the composition of its scents varies in the course of the day. So if a rose seems to have no scent, maybe it is tired. Return a little later and it will speak to you!"

He goes on then to explain his triangle of the "olfactory landscape of the rose", with the base of the triangle having balsam scents (vanilla, heliotrope, tonka bean...) and wood scents (cedar, patchouli, moss...), with the heart of the scent seeming to be where we derive our rose scent descriptions with the spices predominant (cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon...), then fruit (raspberry, pear, peach), then greenery (grass, ivy, leaves...) and floral (rose, jasmine, lilac). The very peak of the pyramid has the "head scents" that are most fleeting - aromatics (aniseed, lavender, citronella...) and last citrus (lemon, mandarin, bergamot...). He reminds us that roses diffuse their scents beset at a certain temperature (18-20 C) as well as humidity. He suggests that if we don't find a rose has a scent that we should bring it inside in its half opened state at fullest color, and "learn how to smell". Start with calm and concentration, and begin with a "first sniff" of no more than a few seconds, before your olfactory sense is dulled. Then compare that scent to other more stable scents from memory, and directly contrast several roses (starting with the least scented).

I wonder if some of the reason we judge roses to have no scents is that they have a stronger representation at the lower base of this triangle, and their scents both aren't as fruity or "flower-like" as we expect, and also as we've frequently said, we only smell them under a limited range of conditions. It seems like the roses we judge as having "intense" scents seem to have a lot of the higher points on the pyramid with fleeting wafting scents - there's a strong memory of lemon that goes along with Sharifa Asma for me, though Frances Dubreuil definitely carries the "classic rose scent" along with some deeper plummy-fruity smell. Or perhaps our noses are influenced somewhat by our eyes, since I simply can't picture citrus tones in the deep red flowers of FD. Still, the very notion that one of his least frequent "heart" scents is called "rose" means that we have a mental image of what a classic rose should smell like.

I thought I should try this out, to give his method a fair chance, but up in the frozen zones I don't have a lot of options. Not having any roses that aren't frozen crispy critters to try it out on, I started with the book these words were printed on. It's not as goofy as it would sound - books are derived from botanical sources, and presumably they would maintain some of those qualities even in this form. I took a calm but sincere sniff for a few seconds of the book. Hmm, yes, definite base tones of wood and moss, with the musty heart tones of "eau de used book store". I have to admit the latter scent is unmistakable to most of us that frequent old book stores, to the point where you can easily distinguish scent of musty books from other equally decrepit materials. Can't you picture the scent of well-rotted leaf mould as distinct from new leaves, or partly broken down compost?

So what do you think - does every rose have a scent, and we're just too impatient or too limited in our perspectives on scent to realize it? On the other hand, we could broaden our notions of scent too widely and consider that every object has a scent (I must admit I sniffed my computer keyboard here - thankfully, nothing wafted from it as far as I could tell). How do we then view those stiff, long-stemmed and reputedly "scentless" red florist roses? Is it just that we've smelled them under less than ideal harvest and transport conditions, or do those roses really have no scent to speak of even under the best of conditions? Are we just spoiled because the cream of roses have those toe-curling wafting scents and we want every rose to wow us to the same extent without appreciating more subtleties?

I'd be curious if anyone in the warmer zones wants to take up the challenge of contrasting relatively scentless roses with an unbiased sniff test, and let us know what you think. Certainly most of my scentless roses at least smell vaguely green and growing, and I find myself pondering his list to see what that would be (perhaps the "moss" base scents he speaks of). If nothing else, the discussion would be a nice way for us cold zoners to still have some rose input during the long winter we're started on.

Cynthia

Some of the best scents are produced on bushes that get sun in the morning and when the day has warmed up around 11 am. Afternoon roses usually don't have as nice a fragrance as morning ones do. If it's cold outside, I can't smell a thing. Kim told me to cut them and bring them inside so that when they warm up, the fragrance has a better chance to be released.

On highly variable fragrant roses like Jude the Obscure, the weather and temperature changes the scent. I have not tried a fragrance test where some roses are in different soil conditions to see which gives the best fragrance. I do the best with my soil that I can and I get whatever fragrance the roses make with it.

I don't have very much to add or contribute but did decide late this summer that in the next coming growing season I wanted to focus on fragrance as I selected any new roses for my gardens.

I love the idea of taking the time to learn to smell a rose and that some roses might be secretive about their scent and unwilling to let it waft for just anyone. Or that they might just be tired. :) And I am certainly willing to take the time to woo a rose. On the other hand, I also want to walk through my gardens and smell the fragrance of roses without having to work very hard.

Interesting little fragments float around in my mind about this topic and I think many of them are comments roseseek has made: a story about a nursery man who would place a bloom under his hat to heat it up before offering it as a possibility to a buyer, that blooms on different sides of the same bush may be more or less fragrant, and so on. It is a fascinating subject.

My current reading is the Vintage Gardens rose catalog and it is clear that Gregg Lowery is gifted with an extraordinary sense of smell. Wouldn't it be interesting to hear his thoughts, too, on how to learn to smell a rose?

In my gardens, so far, the David Austins are the most fragrant. I have a grouping of Munstead Wood, Lavender Lassie, and Mrs. B.R. Cant... that's a good one. But I am still waiting for most of my roses to build and hoping that they will also develop more of a fragrance as they mature. I've written about it before but I can't help repeating myself because I find it so interesting that such a 'common' modern rose would have such a delightful quality but I have a very large, very happy yellow knockout rose beside a door in my home and as soon it as wakes up in the spring, its FOLIAGE exudes a very strong, very wafting scent of grape hubba bubba bubble gum. It took me a couple years to discover the source simply because I could not fathom at the time that a rose without even a bud could be so fragrant. It's just a silly old knockout rose and yet it is one of the highlights of my garden and something I look forward to every late February, early March.

I've just rambled on pointlessly here.
I'm with you on the influence of the eyes on our sense of smell. Citrus tones are more likely to arise from a rose of a yellow or apricot hue, I think.

A lifetime spent studying the fragrance of the roses in one's garden... sounds like a life well-lived to me. :)

There is also the factor of the nose that is doing the receiving to be considered. Tea roses, for example, can pump out all the tea rose fragrance in the world, but I and others like me simply do not smell it. We humans differ in the variety of chemical receptors for scent we possess.

A bit like trying to describe the colour blue.....or the taste of anchovies.......or why one plant lifts my heart while another leaves me cold.

I would love to join Sidos-House and Porkpal in learning to educate my nose, but I fear my nose is destined to be the dumbest part of my system, with all my allergies and the like. Besides, I'm not sure how much work I want to spend in coaxing a reluctant rose to release some faint amount of scent when it's so much easier to enjoy the visual aspects of the roses already. There are a few roses that knock my socks off with scent, a few more I enjoy to some extent, and many many more that others say smell terrific that are decidedly "meh" to my nose.

I totally agree that some of us are missing necessary receptors as Kim says (though I think I can detect a little of the tea scent), or that there are systematic blocks to some noses (like mine with allergies), but I also wonder if our heads don't have more to do with the scent of roses than just the color. Picture the lady who receives a bouquet of "scentless" roses then sniffs them and says, "They smell wonderful". She might just be saying that to be kind, but if you receive red roses from your sweetheart your head and heart are miles ahead of your nose, and have probably convinced your nose the roses smell great before you ever sniff. Similarly, we might be willing to work harder to coax out or detect the smell of roses we know SHOULD be fragrant, as opposed to say - Sidos-House's fragrant Knockouts.

Look at how little agreement there seems to be when people ask about the most fragrant roses here on Garden Web? There seem to be about 30 or so roses that routinely show up on such lists - Jude the Obscure, Perfume Delight, Double Delight - and such, but even among those that have the stereotypical "rose" smell we don't seem to agree. My Double Delight doesn't bloom very often, but I can't detect a scent from it even indoors under warm humid conditions, and the same for Velvet Fragrance. Obviously conditions and my poor deficient nose affect this. On the other hand, I definitely can smell Perfume Delight and it's such a cloying perfumey artificial smell to me (odd in nature, I admit) that I actively dislike its smell.

I guess my point, if there is one, is that all of our senses are tied up with our emotions, and scent has to be the same. They've done research that we agree to a surprising extent on the relative attractiveness of faces in the abstract (e.g. we like symmetry and big eyes), but that has much less effect on who we actually gravitate to and find attractive in real life. I'll bet that if I tried Delbard's methods I'd find some scents to discuss in the abstract for most roses, but it would take a lot of work to put the scent into words that fall somewhere between "classic rose" and "waxy", and in the end I'd fall back on the dozen or so roses in my yard that curl my toes in fragrance without that kind of effort. The more work I put into finding the scent of a "scentless" rose, the more likelihood that I'd find one, but I'm not sure that effort on my part changes the describable characteristics of the rose itself, just me as the smeller.

Cynthia

The subject of your post is very thought provoking. It was also very thoughtful for you to take the time to expound upon it as you did.

My suspicious, cynical side admittedly popped up as soon as I understood a prominent and financially successful rose breeder, a prominent rose empire figure, Henri Delbard, made the statement that, "all roses have a scent." It prompted me to say to myself, "sure they do, especially those you bred. You, H.D., have everything to gain ($), by encouraging forward thinking rose gardeners/lovers to take a second look, and delve into 'deciphering scent' of essentially poorly scented roses, especially those of your own creation."

In spite of all the ins and outs, and complexities of evaluating rose scent, as H.D. suggests, there are roses, no matter how you 'cut the mustard,' that just don't have much in the scent department to waste your time on. Time spent on concentrating on their other positive aspects, if any, would be more productive.

Do I have to wait until the humidity is at least 85%, on a sunny day with the temperature at least above 75 degrees, after 1:00 PM, and only on days after the Summer Solstice has passed to discover a rose's fragrance, and then convince myself it is fragrant regardless of what my nose is telling me? I cannot be bothered.

Please do not brand me a negative person, I do not believe I am, just tired of being fed, a 'line,' by the experts so called.

For example, I was given a large and expensive gift basket full of: organically grown, gluten free, sugar free, etc., i.e. Yuppie food, of a so called gourmet nature. It came this past Thanksgiving by way of my successful banker nephew, who has money to burn. He spent a small fortune on it. Everything I sampled so far has tasted insipid or stale (sell by dates are all far in the future), a major but expected disappointment.

For example, Heinz or French's Yellow Mustard are hard to beat for flavor and price compared to any outrageous gourmet brand.

Should I be obliged convince myself how wonderful the food is knowing it isn't?..same with no/little scent roses.

Thorntorn

Regardless, I agree with you that it's too much work most of the time to try to detect (or imagine) a scent in a rose that is at best stingy with the scent. It's like trying to train my palate to detect the difference between a $10 bottle and a $50 bottle of wine. I can already tell the difference between truly cheap and a $10 bottle of wine, and frankly I don't WANT to develop a taste for expensive wines - I already have a taste for expensive roses! Sometimes the descriptions of rose scents are rather like those wine taster guides - who wants the taste (or scent) of "tar" or "smoke" in either one?

For me, though, that doesn't mean that roses that don't have much in the scent department aren't worth wasting my time on. With my poor nose, I'd probably be stuck with a dozen or two roses that I could actually smell under normal conditions, and the intriguing look of roses like Red Intuition is totally worth it in my yard even though I can't imagine it having any appreciable scent. I realize that folks like Thorntorn choose roses with fragrance as a top priority, and that's part of the great thing about growing roses - that there's enough diversity of form, scent, growing habits, colors, and other types of roses to satisfy your own personal priorities. I totally agree with Suzy that what speaks to us about a particular rose is very individual and a complex combination of our experiences and priorities not just something that could be prescribed about the rose.

So I agree with Mendocino rose that I wish my nose were better, but I'll settle for enjoying the look of most of my roses and the scent of a few select dear ones. I love the idea kittymoonbeam had to literally drink in some of the scent of those few favorites - I can't see doing that to try to coax a reluctant scent from a rose, but that would be so fun to try with my dear toe-curling fragrant Frances Dubrueil!

Cynthia

I am as much enamoured with roses for their fragrances as I am with them for their blooms. I always check to see how a rose is rated for fragrance before trialing a new variety. Alas, very often, a rose rated as very fragrant proves to be scentless to my nose in this climate.

I grew OGRS and English Roses on the temperate west coast of British Columbia for a number of years and then grew many of the same roses here in the east where the summers are hot and humid. I immediately noticed that many of the highly fragrant varieties that I grew in BC were either scentless, or virtually so here in Ontario.

The statement you make: "He reminds us that roses diffuse their scents beset at a certain temperature (18-20 C) as well as humidity." Is wholly bourn out by my experience. I go back to the west coast quite frequently and my mother in law still has many roses that I planted in her garden, almost invariably the roses in her garden are more fragrant than the same varieties in my garden. Generally the high temperatures in the Fraser Valley of BC are in the high teens to low twenties during the first flush. Here the temperatures during the first flush are often in the high twenties to low thirties during that time and the lows are often in the low twenties. I had come to my own unproven conclusion based on these annecdotal observations that the higher temperatures were the likely culprit and that the volatile essential oils that make a rose fragrant were evaporating much more rapidly and making the rose less fragrant here in Ontario. I often pick blooms and bring them into the air conditioned house to cool, and sometimes that works, especially if they are not fully opened.

I have also done some experiments with people who visit my garden, having them smell blooms and asking them to tell me if they can smell the fragrance. There are always differences in the varieties that are fragrant and scentless depending on who is asked. Many times one person says a certain roses is very fragrant and someone else detects no scent.

So I fully agree, it often takes some work, thought and desire to coax a bloom to treat you to its fragrance. But the effort is invariably worth it.

Cheers, Rick

You presented a well thought out and very interesting post. Thanks again for sharing it with us.

Thorntorn

(Unless the contents are made from scratch by the giver.)

;)

Rideauroselad, your comments about fragrance in your two locations are very thought-provoking and echo some observations about fragrance going on in other threads. It's interesting that you've moved climates to a MORE humid region and seen a drop in fragrance levels, since those of us in dry zones tend to attribute the extremely limited fragrance "wafting" to the humidity. In your case, it clearly seems to be the temperature that's at fault, and it's true that our summers are well above 18-20 C most of the time. Maybe that's why I can detect a little wafting scent in my hyacinths in the late spring, but nothing wafting from even highly scented roses any time after June.

If I ever get a decent fall flush after the weather cools I'll do a little more detective work to explore the relative role of heat vs. humidity in my climate, since even in fall we're pretty dry. At least it gives me something to hope for as far as fragrance goes.

Cynthia