Stinky peonies
and new beginnings

My favorite peony smells like dirty feet. It is so unfortunate. Last spring, I cut them just as they were about to bloom, and put them in water on my desk. It looked like something out of a Better Homes & Gardens photo shoot. (To be clear, just my desk looked this way). After admiring the bloom, I positioned my Hawaiian Sunset Coral Peony artfully at the edge of my Zoom frame, poured myself a piping hot mug of coffee and settled in for my first meeting of the day. It was bliss.

For like five minutes.

I’m kicking off the call when smelled it. A feety, earthy, sweaty smell. I can’t focus on the meeting agenda any more, all I can do is smell this smell. I look behind me to see if my husband or children came in behind me. Nope. I can’t tell you how bad I wanted to smell my armpit, but I was on camera. I feigned a cough, turned my camera off and sniffed. Nope. There weren’t any abandoned apple cores. Or moldy muffin chunks under my desk. Holy macaroni, it was my beautiful peony.

How could something so lovely be so stinky?

Let’s definitely grab a think.

There are a slew of different peonies. Some are potent, like that guy in college drenched in Abercrombie’s Fierce – the one you could smell from stores away in the mall. Others are more delicate, a light breeze can carry the scent – like the wisp of your grandmother’s Chanel 5 from. Others have no scent at all.

The strength of the scent also depends on many things.

Time of day – the early morning typically has the strongest scent to attract pollinators.
Temperature – the higher the temp the fragrant essential oils evaporate and the scent wanes.
Flower Structure – the bushier the peony, the more fragrant it will be because there are more places for that essential oil to hang out. Bomb and the Full Double shapes are the most fragrant. More open types like demi-double (the Hawaiian Sunset Coral) or single are faint or odorless.

Here’s the rub…

I still believe that my peonies stink like feet. After hours of research, I only found some references to certain varieties of peonies not smelling good. But when it was mentioned – it was mentioned. Teresa Futrick from the Altoona Mirror went so far to describe the smell as a ‘raw-chicken-forgotten-in-a-hot-car’ odor.

Folks, I’ve gone down some rabbit holes to figure this out. I’ve gone deep on molecular structures and listened to podcasts on pollination. Here’s where I’m at.

Thought 1. The cilantro gene

Some people love cilantro. They load up their tacos, their guac. But some people (like me AND Julia Childs!) think cilantro tastes like dish soap. To take a deeper dive – check out this article in Forbes. For a less graceful synopsis – this happens for two reasons. One – genetics. OR26A is to blame. If you have it – cilantro tastes painfully soapy, bitter, and/or metallic. Two – neurology. Culturally, we may believe that something tastes bad or that we shouldn’t like it; therefore we don’t. Think chopped liver or fruit cake – the poor guys – they got a bad rap.

So do Teresa and I have a gene that makes us think these peonies smell awful? At the end of the day, does it matter? Peonies want to attract pollinators, not me or Teresa. Maybe some pollinators like the smell of sweaty feet. Which brings me to…

Thought 2. The cents of scents.

Terpenes are a family of scent molecules found in all plants and a main ingredient in their essential oils. They come in all shapes and smells. Alpha & Beta-Pinene are the molecules that give Christmas trees their signature scent. Beta-Caryophyllene, Humulene, Limonene, and Terpinoline are what give cannibus its smoky, clovey, earthy, woody scent. For a non-pot smoker, I love the smell of cannibis. Some budtenders believe that you will get the best high from the pot that smells the best to you. Maybe that holds true for pollinators. They get the biggest bang for their buck by creating the strongest seeds or eating the most tasty meals from the pollen on the plants that smell the best to them.

Thought 3. The sense of scents.

CK1. Estee Lauder’s Sunflowers. Bath & Body Works’s Freesia or Juniper Breeze. When I was younger, the perfumes I’d wear to impress the boys… There is so much pressure on 12 year old girls (another blog post entirely), but also fruits. Did you know, to get a decent quality watermelon, it needs to be pollinated 12 times? And that strawberries need to be pollinated 25 times to get a good-sized fruit? (another reason the value of a strawberry is so high – wink wink).

So consequently, the smell of petunias actually gets stronger at night because they are pollinated by night-loving moths. Snapdragons, on the other hand, emit a scent that is 4x stronger during the day to welcome the morning bees to get up in their business. It is wild. Literally.

Basically, when a flower first starts blooming, its scent isn’t very strong – the pollen isn’t ready for prime time. As the bloom matures, the scent gets stronger to attract bees and other pollinators.

Some plants, when sufficiently pollinated and closed for business, start to stink. When I’m closed for business, tired, or overwhelmed, I kind of stink too.

Whether it is with my words, my shorter fuse, lack of words, lack of showering – we all have our own way of signaling ‘I’m done.’ Lord knows when I was ‘sufficiently pollinated’ with my sons – I too stunk. Smelly feet would have been a welcome change to the roses I was tooting.

So maybe the stink is an opportunity for a new beginning. It’s less about the bad smell and more about how they are using that energy – redirecting it to do something greater for the next season.

Some folks go underground before or need alone time so they can heal or create. Emily Dickinson was a known recluse, but she turned out amazing poetry. Pregnant women typically hide in the first trimester, to grow a human and muster the energy for the arrival. Next year’s blooms. A life change. A new relationship. Your kids. Your bucket list. While someone may appear to be fading in one way, maybe, just maybe, they’re working on something even better.

For now, I’ll follow their lead. Shine in the sun when I have the energy, but also have the courage to fade a bit to conserve my strength for the next new beginning.

I will respect the stink.