Don’t bother to bury your face in a bouquet of store-bought flowers expecting to inhale aromas to delight your nose. Not with today’s flowers, anyway.
Commercial flowers are a feast for the eyes, but not the nose. In the quest for longer shelf life, more vibrant color, and bigger blooms, scent got left behind. Not that lack of scent stops me. Old habits die hard and every time I’m around a bouquet of flowers, I dump my nose in expecting to smell something good.
Not.
As usual, messing with nature has its dark side because scent plays a major role in the cycle of life. All those acres of land devoted to growing scentless flowers means there’s lots of pollinators (bees, moths, hummingbirds, etc.) who are no longer attracted to the flowers because they can’t smell them. That’s not good because the pollinators need the flowers‘ nectar and the flowers need the pollinators.
Thus, the disappearing “scent trail” isn’t a good thing for farmers and others who depend on farming for a living.
Makes me think re-scenting flowers would be a win-win-win: I could enjoy the scent when I stick my nose in a bouquet, bees could find the flowers, and farmers would have healthy, pollinated plants.
All of which makes me vote in favor of flowers with a shorter shelf life and longer scent life.
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