Garden mysteries
May. 11th, 2016 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mme_hardy I was trying to identify a Victorian houseplant, "musk"; readers of Stalky and Company will remember that our heroes smashed the loathsome King's plant. Musk was notorious for its wonderful fragrance; therefore I must acquire it for my garden. I did a lot of Googling and eventually decided the particular musk, based on scale, had to be Mimulus moschatus. I couldn't find it for sale commercially, and the scientific writeups didn't mention the fragrance.
A little more Googling and I found out why. Sometime before the nineteen-teens, commercial musk stopped smelling. There are several reputable references in both the scientific literature and in gardening essays, all of which agree that musk used to be ubiquitous in windowboxes and gardens, but that the writers hadn't smelled it in years, even though the plants continued to be available. Nobody's found a scented wild musk, either. The plants live on, but the fragrance is unattainable.
Scientists' best guess is that the original musk collected from the wild was a rare scented variant, now, as far as we know, extinct. The nurserymen who were propagating musk somehow selected for a scentless strain, probably by emphasizing some other plant quality, and within a generation or two, the scent gene was lost in cultivation as well.
A little more Googling and I found out why. Sometime before the nineteen-teens, commercial musk stopped smelling. There are several reputable references in both the scientific literature and in gardening essays, all of which agree that musk used to be ubiquitous in windowboxes and gardens, but that the writers hadn't smelled it in years, even though the plants continued to be available. Nobody's found a scented wild musk, either. The plants live on, but the fragrance is unattainable.
Scientists' best guess is that the original musk collected from the wild was a rare scented variant, now, as far as we know, extinct. The nurserymen who were propagating musk somehow selected for a scentless strain, probably by emphasizing some other plant quality, and within a generation or two, the scent gene was lost in cultivation as well.
