Aromascope

The Servants of Twilight (With Apologies to Dean Koontz)

June 5th, 2007

By Donna Hathaway

My favorite time of day is late afternoon to early evening – more specifically, twilight, dusk, the “Blue Hour”, the gloaming, whatever you prefer to call it. It is the magic hour when everything feels suspended in time, though it passes far too quickly anyway. When I was a child I though it would be wonderful to live in the tropics, with warm breezes and palm trees. I thought the sunsets there would be even more wonderful than they are in New England in the summertime, where I grew up. Then I found out that he closer you are to the equator, the faster the sun goes down – night falls quickly like a curtain coming down, and it’s all over, and then it’s just dark. I was very disappointed, but also a bit sorry for people who lived there. “What are you saying – they don’t have dusk?” After that I felt better about being “stuck” in a temperate zone, even one that got far too cold in the winter.

One wonderful thing about dusk is that it is the witching hour for many fragrant plants. My first memory of this phenomenon was of a New England native plant that is commonly call Sweet Fern, though it in fact not a fern at all but a small, nondescript shrub named Comptonia peregrina with somewhat fern-like leaves that lives in poor, sandy soil, often near pine trees, and would attract no attention to itself at all but for one thing: its leaves are imbued with a fragrant volatile oil that is released on warm summer evenings. If you find a plant, the sweet odor can be obtained by crushing the leaves, but only on warm summer nights does it give the scent to the air. My family would be out for a drive to cool off after a hot, humid day, and as we passed certain areas near the woods there would the most wonderful aroma, hay-like and sweet, profoundly refreshing and even bracing, yet not minty at all, just extremely, intensely herbal. I would stick my head out of the car window like a little dog on these drives, drinking it all in. Of course, there were other summer scents in my childhood too, but the memory of this is very strong.

As an adult with my own garden, I became fascinated with night-blooming flowers. I was always working during the day, and when I was home in the evening I had my only chance to enjoy the garden. By then, the most colorful reds, purples and oranges disappear into the shadows, and the sun-loving roses begin to shut down their scent factories. I started out with night-scented stock (Matthiola bicornis), a tiny, fragile-looking relative of the fat, double florist’s variety. This little gem is in the cress family, a relative of cabbage and broccoli. Like its edible cousins, it has small flowers arranged on slender spikes. During the day, its pale, washy mauve blossoms droop and look listless in the bright light. Then a most marvelous transformation occurs when the sun starts to set. The plant seems to draw itself up, the little flowers straighten out and open wide, and an intoxicating fragrance fills the night. It is extremely sweet and candy-like, like a heliotrope on steroids. It lasts a good long time until full darkness, when the show is over. Plant it under a window on the shady side of the house that stays open at night and it will fill the house with its perfume.

After this discovery, I searched for fragrant plants that would grow in my zone, which is now the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. (It is at about the same latitude as New England, so the summer evenings are just as long.) Ornamental tobaccos caught my attention. The most photogenic one is Nicotiana sylvestris, the woodland tobacco, with its huge lyre-shaped leaves and long white tubular flowers giving off a cool scent in the evening. Much more powerfully fragrant, however, is Nicotiana alata, the aptly named Jasmine Tobacco, with bigger flowers and a more lax growth habit. It needs support, unlike the freestanding Nicotiana sylvestris, but its perfume is stupefyingly rich and sweet. It blooms from May to November here, and can even live over winter when protected from heavy freezes. Like the little stock flowers, these droop all day and come alive at night.

My favorite flowers of all are lilies, and though not all are fragrant, the ones that are become markedly more so at night. This is the time of year for the Madonna lilies to send their alabaster spikes up, and the sight of these in bright moonlight is unforgettable. A little later comes Lilium regale with its jasmine-and-spice aroma, then in July comes the heavy, honeyed perfume of the later trumpet lilies. In late July and August the Oriental lilies put on a similar show. Then there are other delights such as fragrant African gladiolus, four-o-clocks, night phlox (actually Zaluzianskya), tuberose, gardenia, and petunias. If you take the time to look for them, there are many very fragrant petunias. My favorite is Supertunia Priscilla, a violet and white veined double that exudes a strong fragrance even during the day; at night it’s simply superb. What we call night-blooming jasmine is not a true jasmine at all (Cestrum nocturnum), and the flowers carry a hint of poisonous danger in their intoxicating perfume, so heady that it is unbearable indoors. ( I adore it, of course.) Then there are the moonflower vines, unfurling milky white saucers before your eyes as darkness falls, and giving off a soft, sweet aroma as light as the air itself.

This brings me to why this is so, and the title of the article; many plants are pollinated by creatures that fly at night. No bees or butterflies for these nocturnal blooms, but moths and other little winged things visit them. Most night-scented blooms are white or pale in color in order to be seen more easily, but they must have other ways of being found. So they send forth the perfume that attracts the beasties that will spread their pollen around, offering them sweet nectar as even more enticement. In the case of moths, the females of some species give off a sweet odor to attract the males. Since they can’t be seen at night either, they are basically putting on sexy perfume! The plants are just mimicking that for their own needs, adapting and evolving over the millions of years since flowering plants first appeared; hence the insects, and us, are merely their servants, as we encourage them to grow in our gardens and they quietly but effectively ensure their survival by pleasing humans with something that furthers their own agendas. Our olfactory pleasure is just a sideshow to the main event.

Image source: Night Blooming Jasmine from almostedenplants.com

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