MUSK'S PERFUME

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 95, 23 April 1931, Page 21

MUSK'S PERFUME

STILL LOST

Dr. A. W. .Hill, Director of tho Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has drawn the attention of the British Association to the tragedy of the musk plant, which "a few years before the war, quite suddenly lost its scent," and has never regained it. Dr. Hill cannot evea get a plant or seed from the home, of the musk in British Columbia which retains the once-familiar odour. Why did those plants, in all parts of tho world, simultaneously lose their scent? It is, Dr. Hill thinks, a pretty problem which the ccoiogist and the chemist might well take in hand.

The loss of the scent is only too well known to- those who once gT6W musk. Twenty years ago the plant was common in cottage windowsj and its fragrance pervaded greenhouses. Its yellow flower is itself quite attractive, but it was the odour that really commended it. Suddenly reports began !,o come in to horticultural societies from all quarters that the musk smelt no longer, and, on inquiries being made in the plant's native habitat, the same phenomenon was recorded. Nor was it a case of new musk plants coming in that lacked odour; the old ones had been deprived of it. Letters are constantly being received by the Royal Horticultural Society that the plant has been found to smell again, but tho general view is that though under certain accidental conditions some scent may have been noticed, there is no accepted evidence that the musk has become its old self again. "I well "remember the disappearance of the scent," said Mr. J. L. North, the curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Regent's Park, to a London "Observer" correspondent. "We have grown musk here for many years, and grow it still, but it has no scent. Somebody once offered £5 for a musk plant that would smell, but ''tho prize has never been claimed. '

"I remember when nearly every cottage had a musk plant. Pieces of root would bo transferred, from one cottage to another, so keen wero the people. Now you may travel in the country all day and never see a musk, though it is still quite common in France."

Asked what _he thought of the proposal that an investigation should be made, Mr. North said he was not sanguine as to the result. He himself has made attempts to recapture the scent of the musk, in Regent's Park, and he showed the record of his experiments. "You have nothing to work upon—no scented musk to guide you —not even in the place where it originally came from in 1826," he said. "We never knew what part of the musk it was that produced the smell, though from the fact that tho srnoll was most apparent when the plant was rough, I think the smell was in tho hair.''

Mr. North was asked if tho statements sometimes made that the rose, the violet, the wallflower, and the mignonette lacked their old fragrance throw any light on the subject. "No," ho'replied. "They are not parallel cases. The loss of scent by these flowers is explained simply by the fact that we choose to cultivate plants for qualities other than scent. Cultivators pay attention to size and beauty, and in douig that they cause the flowers to lose scent. The object of scent is to attract insects, and when tho florist takes up! the. job the plant does not want insects, and therefore dooa not waste its time producing fragrance.