Prunus is a species that is so vast and important I hardly know which picture to use for my intro! Here’s a spoiler though: Peaches, Almonds, Apricots, Plums, and Cherries. And they are ALL fragrant! Well mostly… some more than others, for example: many cherry trees are unfortunately not fragrant, as much as we want those beautiful blossoms to be! Some cherries are lightly fragrant, with a scent combining baby powder and cherries, but I have no unfortunate idea what species or cultivars they could be. Not like it matters much, Cherry blossoms will be a spring cultural favorite regardless of scent anyways. And then you get to sandcherries (P. pumila), of which certain cultivars are so fragrant that I go out of my way to smell them each year, even though they are cultivated more for the purple leaves than blossoms. Sand cherry smells more like plum than cherry, but the fragrance is sweet and fruity and the tree has leaves in a beautiful purple easy to get along with.
Prunus mume. Kakidai. Wikimedia Commons.
As for the secret to Prunus blossoms: they smell like the fruit they are going to be in the long run. Peaches smell peachy, apricots apricot-y, plums like honey coated prunes, so on and so forth. The more fragrant members of the family are P. mume, the Japanese Apricot/Chinese Plum, that blooms on warm days in February with a sweet fragrance (and provides us with plum sake, one of my personal favorite alcoholic drinks on the planet); P. cerasus, the sour cherry; most of the plums; and almonds, P. dulcis, which are the most fragrant of all with a baby powder sweetness and almond finish. Many plants capture the almond flower essence if the tree is unavailable to the nose, including several wildflowers like Epigea repens, the Trailing Arbutus that blooms in early May in old forests in the Eastern U.S.,several Clematises, and sweet almond verbena (Aloysia virgata). The Prunus species has a large range of bloom from early to late, so surely the nose will catch at least one!
There are many blooming trees this time of year and Prunus are but a few of the fruiting ones that grace us with fragrance right now. Later I’ll explore pears and Hawthorne, which are not as pleasant to the nose, and Apples, which are beyond compare in sweetness. Lastly, the weather around here has been erratic lately, and luckily for me has turned cold, allowing me more time to delve into this fragrant season! Luckily we avoided a huge freeze last night in town, but others out in the country likely were not as lucky, and as long as we warm back up and it doesn’t snow again hopefully we’ll all be happy right?
Anyways the next few days I probably won’t make any long posts with Holy Thursday and Good Friday, but I will certainly do an excerpt on Easter favorites in time for Sunday.
Fragrant Earth 