Editorial July
2010
20 years of Cactus
and Adventures
Dear Readers,
Last Sunday, I decided to prepare carrots with mushrooms.
Cutting mushrooms into slices, I realized that they exuded no smell of the
forest. Even with my nose just above, they remained desperately odourless. I
said to myself that probably one of these food scientists had doubtless managed
to abolish the smell (and the taste) of
mushrooms. On TV, they ask us - for our health - to eat fruits and
vegetables, but full of willingness, when I go to the supermarket, I often
return disappointed, rather than have to return with fruit or vegetables like
enormous, very red but hollow and insipid strawberries deceiving the eye, the
beautiful but very hard and corky peaches, grapes with only sugar and no taste,
totally unripe mangoes or pineapples which have had no time to be in the sun to
ripen and which will rot on our table even before maturing.
We
have not lost our sense of the taste! Food has become insipid and odourless, in
the name of globalization, I suppose...
A
desire for the smells on Sunday, took me to my greenhouse, to rediscover and
make a short journey into the country of the secret smells and the flavors of
our beloved plants: Echinocereus palmeri, with the flowers smelling of
chocolate; E. viridiflorus, the first one of the season, had it a lemony smell?
almost as much as Mammillaria sphaerica, or surculosa. A twenty years old
Discocactus still had its half-opened petals giving a hint of the heady scent
which it had released throughout the night, in search of a hypothetical
pollinator. Arthrocereus mirabilis is as small as its perfume is powerful. But
its flower was already closed in the early hours.
When
Crassula muscosa (ex lycopodioides) is in flower it smells rather like the
wee-wee of a cat, and what to say of stapelias which warn us when they are in
flower, not only for the troops of green flies which visit the greenhouse, but
especially for the unpleasant, foetid smell which they exude. We can only be
surprised by the pleasant coconut flavor that Pleiospilos bolusii gives, or
still the pleasant spicy smell of the Senecio rowleyanus flowers.
And
then, I imagined all the flavors which escape us, because we cannot appreciate
them, a little like the ultrasounds, that we do not hear. It reminds to me of
the debate of some botanists who asserted that Pachypodium lamerei has perfumed
flowers against those who absolutely denied it..
Years
ago, then working at Canary Cactus in the middle of two enormous plantations of
hundreds of Pachypodium lamerei planted for their artificial pollination, when
they finally flowered for the first time, in the first lights of the sunrise,
the sum of each of the flowers of all the planted plants had left in the air, a
cloud of a discreet but unmistakable aroma. When the first follicles appeared,
I had to face the evidence: a small moth with a rather long proboscis (tongue)
to make the fertilization had worked for me: it had perceived the subtle scent
of flowers and was simply attracted by it. The happiness of the naturalist
bases itself on such observations.
I
wish you a summer full of smells and fragrant pleasures.
Joël Lodé