Popular plants raise a blooming stink

How did all these stinky plants get into our gardens? I'm talking about malodorous things such as that current darling of West Coast designers, the striking, silver-leaved honey bush, Melianthus major. Elegant foliage, yes, and interesting flowers, but whoa, what an odor.

Brush against this beauty and you'll want to move it a little farther from the garden path. It's like growing dirty socks in your garden.

I'm told that the most popular plant at the University of California, Irvine Botanic Garden sales doesn't smell like a bed of roses either. It's a plectranthus named P. ciliatus "Kirstenbosch," but "that's nothing, you should smell P. neochilis," said nursery manager Laura Lyons. "I call it the skunk plant." It has been banished from the garden's beds because it's so "skunky."

On a list of plectranthus grown at this Orange County, Calif., garden, no fewer than nine new kinds — some of which are showing up at nurseries — have some mention of an unpleasant odor, from "faint" to "very strong." P. zuluensis is one of the most foul, yet is also one of the most common at nurseries. Why anyone would plant it is beyond me.

And we shouldn't forget the phenomenon of the corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanum, blooming at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif., two years ago (the same kind of plant was stinking up the University of Washington's greenhouse last spring). About 76,000 crazed fans stood in line for hours to catch the stench of rotting meat coming from its huge flower.

Am I missing something here? What happened to redolent and fragrant? What's this stink about?

Ron Vanderhoff, the nursery manager at popular Roger's Garden in Orange County, pointed out that it's not just a few newcomers that smell bad. Society garlic, Tulbaghia violacea, for example, has been around for years and is one of the most common plants in our landscape. Its foliage smells really bad and comparing the scent of true garlic to the malodorous society garlic is probably libelous.

In front of this nursery there is a planting of a pretty variegated horehound, Ballota nigra, and Vanderhoff told me that customers frequently walk in with a leaf, asking if the nursery carries this plant. "We do, but first we crush a leaf so they can smell it," said Vanderhoff. "It smells just like dirty socks, but people still buy it." Go figure.

"It does make a nice little spreading ground cover," he added, which is why stinky things get planted at all — they have some other redeeming quality, which, come to think of it, is also why people put up with blue cheese.

Dracunculus vulgaris is a notable stinker. It looks vaguely like a purple calla lily but smells like a corpse flower. I once made the embarrassing mistake of planting one in my garden just outside the bathroom window, although it did not stay there for long. I remember walking into the bathroom the day it first bloomed, wondering what was wrong with the plumbing.

The velvet plant (Gynura sarmentosa), has lovely, velvety-purple leaves, but the dandelion-like flowers smell bad. It is commonly suggested that the buds be pinched off before they bloom, but some enthusiasts disagree. Savor the smell, they say, only half-kidding.

The various Stapelia and Huernia species are succulents with strange fleshy flowers that lie on the ground like old liver, flies buzzing overhead.

Complex chemistry generates the putrid-smelling flowers. Rather than honey bees, these plants attract the more common fly as a pollinator, or perhaps tropical dung beetles.

Nature's reason for really stinky foliage is less clear. One of the real stinkers in this respect is Clerodendron bungei, another I have firsthand experience with.

I planted one in the backyard under a big tabebuia tree near the patio.

I bought it at the Huntington plant sale and figured the bothersome smell in the vicinity of this plant was probably coming from all those frantic, sweaty shoppers.

After all, the common name of "Cashmere bouquet" would suggest that this plant was fragrant, not fetid. The flowers are fragrant, it turns out, but the leaves stink.

Had I known its other, older botanic name was C. foetidum, I would not have bought it because anything named foetidum or fetidus usually smells bad.

But too late, it's planted and every now and then while sitting on the patio in summer (thankfully it is leafless in winter), I can smell that armpit odor, a reminder that someday I must get rid of this plant, however interesting or pretty its flowers might be.