A Horrible Smell
A Horrible Smell
When I walked out of my house & smelt the pungent stench of semen, I never expected my journey to end up here.
Hi,
As I walked out my door I was hit in the nostrils by the smell of semen.
It was spring. I’d just left my apartment, and the stench hit me like a punch in the face. I continued wandering down the street, hoping a calm breeze would send the smell on its way — but this is LA, and there is no breeze.
It took me a few days and a lot of texts to friends to understand the culprit: Pyrus calleryana, known commonly as the Callery pear tree.
“We had them all around our high school courtyard, so when we’d be walking to classes or at lunch, we’d just have to sit amongst that smell, like, all day,” my friend Rachel told me.
“Like, our teachers would often remark on how, like, bad it was, but we just, like, dealt with it. And I think they were all around the city as well. But like, they were really concentrated in that middle part of the school.”
Listening to Rachel ramble on I realised that people in Los Angeles like to say “like” as much as Kiwis do. At some point I guess “like” replaced “um” as filler. I remember my mentor John Campbell once berating me in the newsroom after an array of “likes” escaped my mouth. I’m still, like, guilty of it.
The Culprit
Now I knew the culprit, I wanted to understand why. Why was this tree planted all the way down my street? Why was it at Rachel’s old school? Why had America taken to the Callery pear with such gusto? Sure, it looked pretty, but what kind of psychopath had decided to plant thousands of foul smelling Cum Trees across the United States?
But before I got to that question, I realised I’d need to know why this tree smelt like this in the first place. After a lot of googling I found Theresa Culley, a professor at the University of Cincinnati. She was a plant biologist, and obsessed with the Semen Tree.
“The answer to your question about the smell is that the plant itself is trying to attract pollinators, so it releases chemicals into the air,” she tells me over Zoom. “So they’re attracting pollinators which come in, move the pollen from one plant to another, the plants produce fruits.”
With every answer, more questions. Why would bees be attracted to a gross smelling flower? During my 41 years on planet earth, I’d discovered most flowers smell wonderful. Flowers smell so wonderful we turn their scents into candles, perfumes, toilet fresheners. Humans like the smell of flowers, and bees like the smell of flowers. What’s the evolutionary advantage to smelling absolutely disgusting?
“Flies,” said Theresa. “Flies.”
Of course the Callery pear tree would be attractive to a fly, an insect I’d never — until now — associated with pollination. “They tend to go for things that smell rotting,” Theresa told me. I tried to get her to admit that included the smell of semen but she was above that, and we moved on. Now my big question: How did this tree get so big in America?