Can A Scent Take you Back?
This could be a scene from my cousin’s floral shop.
On Mother’s Day, my daughter and her family treated us to brunch. It was a cozy bistro where we all squeezed into a cushy booth for family time—my daughter, me and my husband on one side, my three grandchildren and my son-in-law on the other. Immediately our server brought two bouquets, one for me and one for my daughter. They were tall and spiky and tied with raffia and I loved the gift, loved the scents.
But it wasn’t until I was home, putting them in water, that the smell of the one flower began to flood my brain. An hour later I knew—this was a flower that is simply called STOCK. The photo above is stock, and over the years I have been drawn to it, tried to grow it, but was never very successful.
Wiki states that this is hoary stock,[1] a species of flowering plant in the genus Matthiola. The common name stock usually refers to this species. It’s a common garden flower, available in a variety of colors, many of which are heavily scented and used in floral arrangements.
“FLORAL ARRANGEMENTS”– REALLY?
I kept reading: Stock is native to southern Europe…prefers calcareous soils and often grows on cliffs overlooking the sea, or on old walls. It is a plant of the coast, but can be found, naturalized, even in the hinterland up to 600 miles of altitude. I took another deep whiff of those flowers. Is there science involved here? Yes!
The smell cells in our noses are linked to the limbic system – which in evolutionary terms is among the oldest parts of the brain – the part that governs our emotions, our behavior and long-term memory. Scents are the tripwire to memory… could my DNA have something to do with my love of scents of stock? Yes, definitely.
SOME OF MY HISTORY…
My maternal grandmother and grandfather were married in southern Germany and made their way to America in the late 1800s. They had been florists in their native village and when I look at photos of Baden Baden where they came from, YES, the altitude would have been an ideal place to grow stock. In the U.S. they bought land way south of Chicago, tilled an acre and planted flowers and next to that built a rambling Victorian home. Quite a number of years later, their grandson built a shop across the road, one that I visited often as a child. It was the same building that I entered a month before my wedding and asked my cousins to create the bouquets for my wedding.
The Singler Florist house-shop was on a corner. You jangled a bell to let them know you were coming inside. Immediately the scents of flowers filled the air. The floors sloped and creaked as you made your way to the back of the house were large glass-doored refrigerators held floral buckets of flowers, one beautiful bouquet after another.
A greenhouse was connected to the back, and in the spring you could buy your bedding plants there.
THE SCENTS OF MEMORY
That Mother’s Day, when I paused to take in the scent of the stock in my bouquet, the fragrance triggered memory–all of it–the place, the people: an older woman named Aunt Angela, the widow of my grandmother’s brother Henry, who the story goes was killed in an auto accident while swerving to avoid hitting a dog. Henry died. Angela’s jaw was wired for the rest of her life. But she was there, smiling in that old shop–she part of the memory, the scents, the creaking floors.
When my Mother’s Day Bouquet was finally dropping petals and had to be tossed, I saved the dried up pieces of my flowering stock. Maybe when I need something to write about, another memory, they will tripwire my brain back and back some more…
