THE SCENT THAT BRINGS US NEARER HOME

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 1, 23 March 1927, Page 12

THE SCENT THAT BRINGS US NEARER HOME

Miss Eileen Duggan, the writer of this article, is one of Mew Zealand's most distinguished poets. Her published works have won praise from discerning critics in England and other lands. Miss Duggan is a regular contributor to THE SUN.

TT’S odd the way scenes haunt one. -*• E. F. Benson in one of his tooclever novels said once that the nose has the longest memory of all. A faint whiff of some scent smelt in childhood brings back the country road or the city street with blinding suddenness. And there is something else, indefinable, indescribable, about the power of smell. An inland person need sail once only to remember forever, with nauseating fidelity, the odour of a passenger ship. You either love it with your roots or loathe it with your roots Either way you never forget it. A psychologist once determined to experiment with this sense of smell to find the way it affected dreams. He found that flower scents evoked pleasant dreams, and sharp odours, nightmares. Some of the dreamers who assisted in the experiment testified that the associations in waking hours connected with the scent persisted in the dreams. One, on smelling lavender, dreamt of her mother’s old greyblue garden. Another, smelling apples, dreamt of a country orchard. The memory exists below the lintel of consciousness as well as above. Of course when one says the nose has the longest memory one does not infer that the actual sensation is registered in the nose. All sensations are recorded in the brain. Poor Wilde put it best, “It is in the brain that the skylark sings, the apple is odorous, and the poppy red.” Colour and scent meant more to him than to most. But though the nose is not the recorder, it is the carrier, and in the days when scent meant life the sense was highly developed both in wild animals and in primitive man. The wind tells tales to a deer or a savage that we miss utterly. But some trace of the potency, the glory of that power of scent remains. Nothing brings back one’s homeland like a scent of a flower or a tree. “I never get between the pines but I smell the Sussex air,” says Belloc. “Take the flower, turn the hour, and kiss your love again,” says Kilping.

And what is our smell, our national scent, that would bring New Zealand back quickest in a foreign land. Our flowers differ in the north and in the south. It must be one that grows in both. There’s the rangiora now, with its heavymusky scent that the rain deepens until it is almost too heavy, too musky. It is a characteristic scent. There is the ramarama, or native myrtle, with its faint, elusive, barklike odour. There is the bitter smell of the fern. But most of our plants are fertilized by night-flying moths and have no need of perfume for the great plan of Nature. They are white or pale green or pale yellow in flower so that the ghostlike moths may flitter to them. None of the tropical shine and glitter; no humming bird colours about the New Zealand bush. Even the kowhai has the tui and not the bee for its messenger. The rata and the pohutukawa leave no scent that would trouble you forever. The ngaio’s scent is faint, and so is the wineberry’s. The fern’s bitter earthy smell is pungent but not distinctive. All ferns the world over are more or less earthly and tart. There is a general bush smell that we would recognize anywhere as characteristically Zealandian, but you don't meet a whole bush in a strange land. Not that you might meet many of the other plants in a strange land either, for they are indigenous, but variants of some of them are found in South America and in the southern islands. And it is on record that specimens of New Zealand plants have been successfully reared in greenhouses at Home. Everyone has his or her favourite notion of a national scent and mine is the palm lily. At least that’s its Sunday name. Its weekday one is the cabbage tree. Those great luxuriant blooms fill the air around with a penetrating sweetness, billowing bellying sweetness that goes to the bone and beyond. To enter a grove of cabbage trees in blossom is to be drowned, fathom five, in a sea of perfume, to go under without thought and without mutiny, to one °I the headiest deepest odours that God ever made. talk of Belloc and his pines! One cabbage tree blowing in a little wind could bring three islands back. Its a gaunt ungainly thing, a poor relation of the lilies of Bourbon tapesties, a country cousin of the great white Christmas blossoms, but all their purity, their pride, and their majesty is hidden in its breath. —EILEEN DUGGAN.