Oh, that reminds me, until 10 years or so ago smoking was legal indoors in Austria and it was just horrible. No matter where you went, from office to restaurants… the horrible cigarette smoke. When I last visited and someone took me to a café I hadn’t been to forever the first thing I noticed was how strange, I can enter this place and my eyes don’t start tearing up from the smoke.
When I first came to the US about 10 years ago I had no idea what marijuana is. When my wife first took me to the city and showed me around I commented that they must have a lot of skunks living in the city over here since I can smell them everywhere
Favorite smell: several Agastache species smell like a mixture of mint and sassafras. I wish some made soap with this smell.
Weird memorable smell that is both repulsive and attractive: Vinegar Weed or Blue Curls (Trichostema lanceolatum)
Least Favorite: a very full compost bucket (with a lid) accidentally left in a warm greenhouse for a couple of weeks. Such an incredible combination of nasty smells. We had to bury the contents next to the compost pile and I haven’t been brave enough to dig it up yet.
I love the smell of pines (white pines esp.), fresh cut hay and fresh cut wood, lavender, rain on hot pavement, and lilacs. In the late summer/early fall, near Lancaster, PA, the farms have drying tobacco hanging in barns. The aroma is wonderful as it wafts in through car windows. Oh, and fresh picked apples–my parents used to take me to an orchard where you’d walk into a stone building that had bags of fresh-picked apples.
At the University of Delaware, there are trees that flower in the spring (large purple flowers) outside the library that give off an overpowering sickly sweet odor that actually makes me queasy. I have no idea what the trees are–I haven’t encountered them elsewhere. And, pig manure.
It’s hard to pick a favorite out of the many wonderful aromatics around. Frangipangi, gardenia, cinnamon, redwood forest, Douglas fir, growing anise plants, some mock oranges…
But, today at least, I will settle on lemon. I’ve always loved lemon flowers and fresh lemon peel.
As for least favorite odor, while I’m not fond of whale breathe, I think the ~worst~ is putrefaction due to decaying flesh. (Sorry for putting that sensory memory in your mind).
Hard to say what my favorite of so many wonderful aromas is.
But if you spend a summer doing fieldwork on a designated-wilderness barrier island with Atlantic Gray Seal carcasses roasting in the sun or marinating in obscure corners of the salt marsh, you will never be able to categorize any other scent as terrible ever again.
Citrus blossoms rank on there. I have a kumquat tree I’ve been keeping for over a decade and has traveled with me on a few very long moves. I got a Meyer lemon tree recently, but it’s still not quite big enough to bloom. But they have such an intense aroma, I prefer when they bloom outside. It gets a bit much when my kumquat tree blooms after I’ve brought it inside for the winter.
Putrefaction definitely hits as one of the most offensive to me. Not surprising that it ranks so highly for so many. We’re sensitive to it because eating something rotten can be hazardous to our health. Rotten potatoes are surprisingly awful, so it doesn’t have to be animal putrefaction.
Skunks don’t bother me all that much anymore. I used scent lures for camera traps many years ago and the intensity of those concentrated lures got me to the point where skunk spray floating around in the air doesn’t bother me anymore.
Smoke from the things ppl like to smoke (tobacco, marijuana, clove cigarettes) is another terrible one for me. Less so for the smell, but more because of the lung irritant factor. Burnt popcorn is up there on that scale, also.
Fagraea berteroana, known as pua kenikeni in Hawaiian, is one of my favorite smells. Don’t think I’ve ever come across a wild tree, though.
If you get lucky, you’ll sometimes hike Mitchell Canyon on Mount Diablo when all the buckbrush are in bloom, which is a great odoriferous experience.
Worst smell: garter snake musk. One of the main reasons I don’t catch snakes like I used to (although my main motiviation is just to not stress them out).
here’s one that shouldn’t be one of my least favorite smells…but here it is.
sagebrush flats in the southwestern US after a summer storm. such an intense smell that it pushes me towards being physically ill. from a plant that in small doses smells very nice.
I’m not sure I have a distinct favorite or least favorite and a lot of contenders have already been mentioned, so I’ll just add two more to the list:
I like to find Osmorhiza longistylis on my hikes and crush a bit of leaf - it smells pleasantly of anise (which happens to be the way to distinguish it from the similar O. claytonii so that’s my excuse for sniffing it whenever I find it). People who dislike licorice may not find it as pleasant as I do.
A smell I dislike to the point of triggering a gag reflex if really bad (although maybe not as much as rotting flesh already mentioned above) is the putrid odor of ginkgo seeds decomposing on a hot summer afternoon.
Oh that’s a bad one! I had forgotten about it. I am also unable to stand the smell of ripe/over-ripe guava, and years ago when I used to live in a different city, I would bicycle past a house that had both female Ginkgo and guava at the same time
I’m surprised nobody has listed the smell of durian fruit as a least favourite smell. I don’t mind it but there is a reason they are banned in many public places in SE Asia.
The worst! I used to jog on the Naval Academy grounds. They have 150 year old ginkgo trees and I think most of them are female. Getting one (or more) of those rotting ginkgo nuts in the treads of your running shoes was a nightmare.
Favorite: I don’t think I’ll ever stop talking about this one, but I can’t get enough of Pseudogynoxys cordifolia, which is a HUGE (65+ ft) vine which is overly common here in N. Peru. It blooms year-round and the flowers have this scent of maple syrup, blueberries and honey that you can (if you catch it at its peak flowering in early January) smell 16 feet off from the plant (it isn’t very intoxicating, though). There is a small colony of these a few miles from my house and I love just… standing there, sitting in the shadow below the canopy to catch a whiff of their scent. I’ve heard of people not noticing the scent, which is a very, very sad fact.
Jasminum sambac, which my grandmother loves, is also a close second, but I find the scent a bit too weak to fully appreciate.
Least favorite: Quite ironically, in the same places where P. cordifolia thrives, Funastrum clausum enjoys growing and it can ruin your trip if you mistake it for a climbable liana. I have made that mistake, because in the fall it loses its leaves, and the smooth, thick stem seems safe to hold on; bad choice, because it reeks of… rotting onions and garlic and sweat… that’s the closest comparison I can find. The scent lingers for a while in your hands and it can be very upsetting. It has made a couple people I know dizzy, that’s how bad it can be.
