LAELIA ANCEPS: A LESSON ON DISSECTING ORCHID SCENTS

On this gorgeous, sunny fall day, Laelia anceps is in full bloom, with three perfect flowers on a stalk that’s almost 3 feet (1 meter) long. The flowers are large, causing the stalk to arch over gracefully and sway in the slightest breeze. I prefer not to stake my orchid flower spikes because I like to see how they would grow naturally and how they would move to attract pollinators. This year the petals have a bit of a dark magenta splash on them, and are quite beautiful. The whole flower sparkles in the sun with tiny, shimmering points of light. If I were an insect, I would be strongly attracted to the flowers just based on their appearance, which is as nice as that of any hybrid.

My first impulse as an orchid grower is to pollinate the flowers, but I have an orchid show coming up next weekend in Seaside, Oregon, and hope that the flowers will last long enough to make it there and back before doing anything to them. 

Since reading up on orchid fragrance analyses for the making of the “Orchid 17” accord for Sonnet XVII, I’ve started to recognize individual aroma chemical molecules in the fragrances of the orchids that bloom in my greenhouse. What I smell strongly in Laelia anceps is gamma-decalactone. This molecule is a component of many fruit and flower fragrances including gardenia, peach, apricot, and osmanthus as well as fermented products like beer. It’s also used as part of the pheromone communication systems of certain insects. For example, male scarab beetles emit it to attract females – the legendary “chick magnet” fragrance, if you’re a scarab beetle.

In most of the fruits and flowers that contain gamma-decalactone, it’s buried in among many other things, simply rounding, flattening, and mattifying, the scent, but in Laelia anceps, it’s up front and center stage. It’s described by The Good Scents Company as “fresh, oily, waxy, peach, coconut, buttery, sweet”, but that really isn’t how it smells to me. TGSC’s description is more a list of odors that might contain the molecule rather than the odor of the molecule itself. To me, it’s flat or slightly concave, matte, neutral colored, and almost sour, sort of like the smell of a sour dishrag - a sweetish, slightly fermented scent. Laelia anceps surrounds its overdose of gamma-decalactone with just enough bright, fresh floral notes to push it barely over the edge into pleasant territory. I’m sure the insects would love it if I put it outside for them. 

AERANGIS FASTUOSA: THE QUINTESSENTIAL WHITE FLOWER SCENT AND ANOTHER SPRING DRAWING

Sometimes I feel like a soccer mom driving my orchid plants around to go to local shows or to the person who will transport them on the van to and from out-of town shows. A group of my blooming plants took a weekend trip to a show in Spokane, WA, on the eastern side of the state, and just got back last night.

I went to pick them up on my way home yesterday evening, just as it was starting to get dark. When I was unpacking the basket they had traveled in, I noticed a gorgeous white flower scent, something like strongly indolic gardenias and jasmine, but with that special orchid touch. It turned out to be two little Aerangis fastuosa plants, siblings that had bloomed on the same day, pumping their fragrance out with all their little orchid hearts.

Aerangis fastuosa is a miniature orchid that grows in Madagascar. It’s supposed to be a “hot grower”, but my plants have survived many cold winter nights with temperatures in the 40sF (5-10C) and bloomed like clockwork every spring. The leaves are bronze-tinted, and the roots are orange. Each flower is as big as the plant itself, pure white and clean-looking, with a long nectar spur. Like other orchids of its type, it’s pollinated by a long-tongued moth in its natural habitat.

No matter how many times I smell night-fragrant orchids, I’m always struck by the similarity of the fragrances of different species, and their resemblance to other night-fragrant white flowers. There’s a common theme even though each has its own special nuances. Some are a little spicy, some are root-beer scented, some are clean and sweet, and others are indolic. To me, Aerangis fastuosa epitomizes white flower fragrance in its purest form.

I’ve decided to hold an unusual drawing, not for a perfume, but for a young Aerangis fastuosa plant. It will be one of the offspring of the plant that went to Spokane and another unrelated plant of the same species. It’s mounted on a piece of cork bark and should be blooming size by next spring. If you’re a plant person and you’d like to be entered in the drawing, you must live in the continental US (unfortunately, plants can’t be shipped internationally) and be able to grow a mounted orchid. Just leave a comment about one or more of your favorite white flower fragrances. The drawing will be held on Sunday, April 8.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK ORCHID (AND ITS MICRO-MINI COUSIN)

For several years now I’ve been harboring an orchidaceous monster in the making. It’s a standard cattleya plant called Lc Betty Ford ‘York’, and it’s presently occupying almost the entire large table in my solarium. It started out as a tiny seedling, grew at a reasonable rate in the solarium for a couple of years, and bloomed once, as modestly as a cattleya can bloom. Last year it put on a huge spurt of vegetative growth, but didn’t bloom. It finally became so large and unwieldy that I had to move it out to the greenhouse, where it thrived even more. This winter it decided that it would bloom off of the last 3 growths that it had added, with 3 or 4 flowers per growth - enormous flowers, each as big as my outstretched hand.

The flowers are so large and heavy that the usual bamboo stakes won’t hold them up, so they’re supported by tall objects on the table that serve as crutches. The colors on the flowers are gorgeous, especially with the sun shining on them, or through them, lighting them up like a magenta neon sign. The lip is the deepest, darkest, most velvety purple-maroon imaginable, set off by a network of gold stripes in the throat.

But it’s the fragrance that is the main attraction. As cattleya fragrances usually do, it started off indolic, skanky and a little camphorous, but over the past week has gone through a candied rose phase that reminded me of L’Artisan Timbuktu, only to end up today as what I consider the quintessential “orchid” fragrance. It’s juicy, fruity, floral, musky, spicy, and the most sensuous, sweet, watery fragrance you ever smelled. It fills the entire house in the morning. If I were a pollinator, I’d dive right in, drink it, and wallow in it until I was completely intoxicated.

Hybrid cattleyas seem to have largely escaped the movement to de-scent flowers, so most of the naturally unwieldy, standard-size ones have a beautiful fragrance. The mini-cattleyas, on the other hand, have been bred for windowsill size plants with relatively large flowers, and are mostly not fragrant.

The big surprise in the greenhouse this week was the blooming of Maxillaria minuta, a micro-mini orchid that I grew from infancy. The whole plant is no larger than the lip of one of the cattleya flowers, and the flowers are smaller than a lentil. They’re pretty, though - nicely shaped and dark red with a shiny, wet-looking lip. I haven’t detected any fragrance yet, but am hoping that one will develop over the next few days.

One of the things that I find so fascinating about orchids is their mind-boggling diversity. It couldn’t be much better illustrated than by the giant cattleya and the miniature maxillaria.

GOLDEN CATTLEYA

One of my favorite cattleya hybrids is a pound-puppy mutt called (Blc Wattana Gold x Blc Orange Nugget) x Blc Malworth ‘Orchidglade’. It’s a sturdy midsize plant with clusters of golden-orange flowers on short strong stems, held in a fan-like arrangement, well-separated from one another. It’s blooming now, one of the many orchids that suddenly bursts into flower during the winter solstice. It’s pretty enough, but what I really love about it is its fragrance. When the flowers first open, they’re like a civet bomb, spewing indole all over the place, accompanied by a sweet citrusy scent like orange fruit, orange flowers, and vanilla. After a week or so the indole recedes into the background and the orange fruit, orange flower, and vanilla combination takes over.

One of the endearing features of this orchid is the fact that the color of the flowers inadvertently matches the orange scent - or maybe it’s an “intentional” product of evolution. After all, orange trees have fruit and flowers on them at the same time, so it’s possible that pollinators of oranges are attracted to the color of the fruit as well as the scent of the flowers, and some of the same pollinators are attracted to the color of the orchid.

Of course I had to try to make a perfume based on the fragrance of the plant that I have nicknamed the “Golden Cattleya”. I’ve gone through several versions, the first one containing quite a bit of civet, the second one mostly the orange-vanilla combination, and the third one orange-vanilla with a strong sandalwood base. I know sandalwood isn’t part of the orchid scent, but it just seemed to go well with the orange and provides a long-lasting grown-up ending to the whole thing. I can’t decide which version I like best and lord knows I don’t sell enough perfume to go down the flanker route.

The civet composition I eliminated at first because it just seemed discordant. However, when I revisited it a few months later, after the materials had had time to blend, it’s actually very nice, although I think it could use some stronger fruity-vanilla notes. The second version is the one that is the least odd-smelling, sort of like an orange-vanilla dessert, but it’s fairly linear. That’s the one that I’ve distributed as samples. The sandalwood version was an attempt to boost the base, and I actually like it a lot, but then I’m a big fan of sandalwood in all of its real and synthetic permutations. It’s the least true to the flower, which I view as a down side. I'm still trying to make up my mind which direction to go.

If you’re interested in trying samples of all three versions of Golden Cattleya and commenting on the pros and cons of each, leave a comment to that effect. I’ll send samples to up to three people for their evaluation.

BRASSAVOLA ORCHIDS AND LITTLE STARS

It seems like time to write about another one of my creations, so what better place to begin than with the orchid that started it all, Brassavola Little Stars? Brassavola orchids are native to Central and South America, where they grow as epiphytes on tree trunks and branches. They have cylindrical, spiky leaves and masses of thick, exposed roots that most people would consider ugly, but when they bloom, what a show! Little Stars is a hybrid between two different species, B nodosa and B cordata, and it was the first Brassavola that I grew, back before I knew much about orchid growing. The first time it ever flowered, I walked into the house one night and smelled the most amazing and unexpected fragrance, something like ylang-ylang spiced with cloves. I had no idea what it was or where it was coming from, but it didn’t take long to trace it to my blooming orchid plant with its sprays of green and white flowers.

To make a long story short, the plant bloomed repeatedly over the years, each time producing the same exquisite fragrance, but only at night. Since then I’ve grown other white, night-fragrant orchids, native to both the Old World and New World, and found that most of them have a similar fragrance, a stunning example of parallel evolution.

Every time I smelled my night-fragrant orchids I thought how wonderful it would be to create a perfume that was like their scent. Eventually I had to try, starting with the ylang-ylang and cloves that seemed to be the basis of the Little Stars fragrance. It was then that I quickly discovered the principle of top notes! Both ylang-ylang and clove are fairly short-lived fragrances, so the mix would be gone within an hour. I then had to experiment with base notes, trying to come up with something that would hold the scent on the skin for a reasonable amount of time. I won’t bore you, dear reader, with all of my trials and errors up and down the learning curve, but in the end I settled upon a base that contained several different resins, spikenard, cedarwood, and a little synthetic agarwood (oud). The rest of the mix includes some citrus, green tea, and a few other floral notes. I would say that in the end, the blend is about 80% natural and 20% synthetic.

In the end, because of the constraints of perfumery, the fragrance isn’t exactly Brassavola Little Stars, but rather its dark and brooding cousin. It has the delicate, sweet and spicy top notes of my Little Stars’ flowers, but they’re riding on the strong shoulders of a woody, earthy base. Several people who have tried it describe it as a “goth” fragrance. Maybe that’s fitting for a flower that only comes out at night.