Tuesday, May 06, 2003

Can you smell that? It’s

Can you smell that?  It’s springtime!  The scent of birds newly chirping, freshly mowed easter eggs and the fall fashion preview.  Sap is rising, boars are rutting, and the slap of hockypucks is competing with the crack of baseballs against the foreheads of distracted spectators.  Ah, springtime.  It brings to mind our mysterious, silent arboreal neighbors, the trees.  Benign, canopied oxygen factories, offering shade to the overheated and concealment to the prehensile, brachiating, or clambering among us.  Among you, anyway.  I’ve been fooled too many times by those sneaky bastards.  Sure, they look nice on tv, or from the comfort of the navigator’s seat of a speeding car, but some of us have had the questionable pleasure of close personal contact with trees and, let me tell you, they hide a terrible secret.  Or anyway some of them do, and I don’t have the patience to sort out the troublemakers from the do-gooders.  But if you have that kind of time, I’d like you to wash my car please, and then you can review this short list of TREES THAT WILL MAKE YOU GAG:

(note: I first started thinking along these lines some months ago with a post about the Bay Laurel (March 17 03 if the link doesn’t work).  That’s a pretty, and pretty hardy, tree, with a kick that will blow your eyes out your earholes if you crush up a few fresh leaves and inhale their scent deeply.  Then, a few days ago, while I was breeding thoroughbreds or mapping genomes or something productive, a phrase occurred to me: “Box privet.” I know what it means (you’ll have to scroll down for the reference).  I just thought of it and started giggling.  Filthy shrubbery, it should be ashamed of itself.  But it’s not.  So instead I just wallowed in prurient amusement until I thought of writing this.  And that’s where babies come from!)

Ailanthus: this tree is invasive and opportunistic, even to the extent of growing in New York City, where nature herself dons a Kevlar vest.  Also known as the Tree of Heaven, to which it stinks.  “All parts of the tree, especially the flowers, have a strong, offensive odor, which some have likened to peanuts or cashews.” Now, I like my peanuts (when properly enrobed in honey and salt) and cashews (gesheuntheit), but I know when there’s too much of a good thing and this is one of them.  Rancid nut stench is not my idea of a preferred scent, especially when it’s infused throughout the breadth and height of an 80 foot tree.  Others describe the smell as similar to goat urine.  I leave these distinktions to the experts. 

Bradford Pear: What a lovely sight, fruit trees in bloom.  Look while you can, before your eyes start watering and the abdominal spasms force your attention to lower realms.  The fruit is not edible.  The trees die after about 30 years.  And THEY STINK: “Various sites devoted to tree culture describe the smell variously. Several call it pungent, which is true, but somewhat like saying the Atlantic Ocean is damp. Others compare the scent of Bradford blooms to everything from wet socks to carrion. A student of mine says it’s fishy. None quite touched its awfulness for me….Think of a possum that has lain dead in the hot sun for several days being cremated on a pile of burning tires.” For anyone who really likes the smell of burning decomposed marsupial, I believe there are more than enough actual possums around to satisfy your jones.  There’s no reason to plant something that will impose that smell on the rest of us every year for a third of a century. 

Ecualyptus: I often actually like the smell of eukes.  They’re endemic, though not indigenous, in this area.  Story goes, the Spanish planted them by the buttload so they could grow wood to make boats – but euke wood is weak and unsuitable for that purpose.  The trees grow quickly, yes, but they can be very weak and sometimes limbs fall off.  When this happens, the oil has a sharp, pungent odor – not like a cough drop or other menthol product, more like an industrial solvent with week-old compost floating in it.  Plus, eukes are not good habitats for birds and their leaves don’t decompose so other things can’t grow around them.  Euke forests are quiet and the ground there is barren under a blanket of those leaves.  Stinky in so many ways. 

Carob: when I asked Kel a few days ago to name a stinky tree, she came up with Carob right away.  They’re sturdy, broad trees, they grow well and cast good shade.  What do they smell like?  There’s no way to put this delicately.  They smell like spunk.  Jism.  Groinsquirt.  Babyjuice.  They were planted all over my Jr. High; I thought it was just me for the longest time… It’s a smell so rich and pungent you can almost taste it.  I wound up walking far out of my way to class every day to avoid the “Saturday night bathhouse” aroma.  Even the Straight Dope weighed in on this one, so I know now it wasn’t only a personal problem.  Well, maybe partly, but there were extenuating circumstances.  It was mainly the trees.

But the winner, by a nose, has got to be the

Gingko: it seems colleges around the country have a predilection for planting these delicate, spindly trees.  Maybe because colleges are so full of binge drinkers that everything smells like vomit anyway.  Because that’s what a gingko pod smells like.  They drop by the buckets in the springtime, waiting for unsuspecting feet to trod upon them, releasing a stench that’s unbelievably rank and persistent.  My own alma mater is a beautiful, ivy-covered, tree-lined urban oasis – but damn, if you step on one of those pods on your way to class, leave your shoes in the hallway, puh-leeze.  They say our founder, Benjamin Franklin, liked these trees.  It’s also said he liked organ meats and iced coffee enemas.  That is to say, just because someone liked the smell of vomit two hundred years ago doesn’t mean we have to like it now.  And for the record, the link above is funny and generally perceptive, but the smell at issue is not that of dog pudding.  It’s emesis.  Regurgitation.  Heaving the gorge.  Unswallowing.  Piloting the vitreous buick.  Gingkos are the rudest non-digestive thing I’ve encountered in a damn long time. 

Now that you’re properly armed against the plots being hatched under our very noses by those petrified ents, the overgrown weeds that stain our air and soil our soil, you can frolic in the vernal groves with abandon.  But don’t come crying to me when you smell something gross.  I swear, it wasn’t me.