How interesting! (the original article) I wonder what they would smell like to me.
--- On Thu, 9/10/09, Edward Frank <[email protected]> wrote: From: Edward Frank <[email protected]> Subject: [ENTS] Re: [WNTS] Re: Ponderosa Pines: Rugged Trees With A Sweet Smell To: "ENTS Google" <[email protected]>, [email protected] Date: Thursday, September 10, 2009, 8:52 PM WNTS, ENTS, There are a number of professions and hobbyists that make a living trying to describe the aromas of various things. There are wine connoisseurs who describe the aroma of wine as well as its taste. There are perfume makers that focus on smells. I wonder how these people would describe the different odors of different species of trees? Would there be any consensus on the descriptions? For that matter it might be interesting to take a survey of just average people to say ten different species of trees. Ask each to describe the odor of the tree and write it down without telling anyone else what they wrote. Then at the end the results could be compared. I wonder if there could be some way to give them a quick shot of training their olfactory senses to get better results. Maybe a panel of standard smells - say vanilla, coffee, chocolate, rose petals, turpentine, etc could be used as training or a standard. Any Ideas anyone? > Ponderosa Pines: Rugged Trees With A Sweet Smell > by Daniel Kraker > > http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?verified=true&storyId=11... > > ...In Arizona's Coconino National Forest, tourists take hiking tours through > the trees. You don't have to look hard for them — they're everywhere. As > prolific as Ponderosas are, there's still a lot that scientists don't know > about them. For example, they change color as they get older. And they begin > to smell a bit strange, too. "Early lumbermen who came out here thought they > were two different species," says Steve Hirst of the U.S. Forest Service, who > leads tours through the area. The trees with black bark were called black > jack pine; those with yellow bark were called yellow pine. But they're the > same tree — the yellow ones are just older. When the tree reaches 110 to 120 > years old (a mere teenager for a Ponderosa pine), it begins to shed its black > bark and reveal an inner bark of yellow. > ...There's something else that begins to happen to the tree in the > yellowbelly phase. Stick your nose into a crevice of the bark and take a big > sniff. It may smell like butterscotch or vanilla. The next person who smells > it may insist it's more like cinnamon, or even coconut. Scientists don't know > why a closely sniffed Ponderosa smells like baking cookies. > > Edward Frank Ed Frank “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again” - Ralph Waldo Emerson --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org Send email to [email protected] Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees?hl=en To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
