I'd just like to note, as Charlie did in the comments below, that there has been a scientific paper comparing the odor of the Callery pear tree and cum. Amazing stuff:
In my old townhouse subdivision, three of my neighbors had Bradford pear trees in their front yards. We had a cherry tree. Four years later, I think we were the only house in that block that still had a tree. The Bradford pears fell victim to tropical storms, high winds, and snow/ice.
I feel like the Bradford pear might be a metaphor for America these days. Looks pretty, smells bad, poisons the ground, invades other places, and has to be held together with duct tape and string.
There's one on my neighborhood walking route, and I thought I was the only one repulsed by it!
My unscientific theory: the past didn't smell great to begin with. Most of us remember the cigarette smell that permeated our childhoods- whether it was in our own home or a restaurant, airplane, or nightclub we snuck into as a teen. Life stinks, literally! Our modern antiperspirants were patented as late as the 1940s. People used to have so.much.carpeting in their homes. Pets amplify the problem. If you're desensitized to bad smells, the Bradford is just a pretty tree.
I don't know why people would plant one today. Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.
Smoking permeated so much. I was in my early twenties when the smoking ban came in and suddenly it was horrifying how much the smoking had been covering up the smell of farts on the dance floor.
Ha! Can I ask where this was? Like, was this a club on a cabbage farm??
I wish I could remember what places smelled like after the smoking ban went into effect where I lived. I was at university at the time. I do remember being happy that I no longer had to wash my hair after going out.
This is fascinating. Here in North Carolina, the state forest service and other groups are offering bounties for homeowners to remove and replace their Bradford pears due to competition with native species and concerns over how they impact the local ecosystems. If a homeowner gets rid of their Bradford, they get a free native tree to plant in its place! https://forestry.ces.ncsu.edu/2023/02/nc-bradford-pear-bounty/
Other states/municipalities have done that with the Ginkgo tree, or at least limited to one gender to limit natural propagation (as it is a gendered tree). Apparently the female version of the tree has some unpleasant smells when fertilized fruits grow.
Ginko fruits ripen and drop on the ground, when they split open they smell like feces! There was a Ginko tree on my street when I was a teenager and in warm summer weather I had to cross to the other side of the street, the smell was so bad!
I always thought they smelled of vomit, but smells are subjective and things often smell different to different people. The bad smell is from a chemical called butryric acid which is also present in vomit.
Now I've gone down a research rabbit hole. Wow! I could waste my afternoon trying to get to the bottom of that story but sadly I have other work to do. Fascinating anyway.
I wondered why Raleigh was smelling so bad last year. I always thought it was the traffic on 540. Joking. Before I moved to Charlotte I remember hearing about that.
I’m not sure if it’s the same tree, but there’s definitely a tree that smells like cum in Aotearoa. It used to freak me out when I was a teenager, I thought everyone could smell that I’d been jerking off. I was immensely relieved when I found out it was a tree.
It was outside one of my classroom windows. I would sit in class sweating buckets, wondering how the hell it smelled so strong. I can laugh about it now but also, fuck that tree.
Thank you for making me giggle today! I needed some levity. Your image caption: "Frank Nicholas Meyer looking for disgusting trees to bring back to America." made me smile and the line:
"America won’t give up its guns, but it’ll give up its Cum Trees." made me straight up cackle!!
Also...I feel like cum should smell better. Just saying.
Maybe we need to start watering these Cum Trees with pineapple juice? I feel like I've heard that's helped with humans? LOL!
I love that “My cum smells like blossoming flowers” is a factual statement for men everywhere. Also, I sincerely hope that the person who makes that ‘Jacob Elordi’s bath water’ candle used the Callery Pear as the base note.
Oh my god, I can't believe no one is talking about the bees!! I live in North Alabama and these trees absolutely *surrounded* our schools and parks when I was a kid (late 90s-early 2000s.) My elementary school and middle school were connected buildings and these trees were right next to the entrances and lined the sidewalk/car pick up lanes. Not only were we all practically choking on the smell, we were fucking swarmed by BEES. Like, hundreds of bees! Every single year! It was terrifying! There were so many times that recess was moved into the gym or cancelled entirely because the playground was a fucking war zone!
On top of that, we have this whole "Keep Alabama Beautiful" initiative (https://keepalabamabeautiful.org) and the classes rotated volunteering. Some years we had to entirely re-plant the flowers/bushes in front of the school, which I now know is because the trees probably killed them all! And we also re-planted the fucking trees!
I'd never encountered the Cum Tree when I was growing up, until I finished high school and moved to Christchurch.
I remember standing in front of my then work building, waiting for a courier, and smelling that funky shit wafting through the air. I was a bit confused at first as I couldn't pin the smell. Was that Janola? No, something else.
Just then my boss walked past, and without thinking I go "Can you smell jizz?"
He just looked at me like I'd had a head injury and carried on walking.
My Dad (a wholesale nursery grower of 40+ years) has grown these for garden centre's and town planners for years, even has his own clone out there on the rise. The reason town planners like them is they are upright and don't shed too much rubbish onto sidewalks as the pears on the ornamental varieties aren't edible and too small to make much mess. I have grafted them and can confirm the understock species have massive spikes on them, but the grafted tree does not. I have a very limited sense of smell so can't say I've noticed the semen scent and I'm thankful for that😅 they are still flying out the door and he can't grow enough of them to meet supply. I've not heard of them being an invasive species in New Zealand though and Doc is very hard on Plant growers here, we get visits often to make sure we aren't growing anything that will fuck the environment. Anyway that's a growers perspective😁
My first introduction to grafted trees was very recently when I was wondering why the lemon tree had these massive eff-off spikes on some of the branches...and also these weird oranges growing out of them?!
To true, just look at what gorse has done😬 After some trials growing Pyrus understock from seed I believe we have too mild a climate to scarify the seed to become a problem but defiantly bares keeping in mind for all plants not endemic to NZ👍
I don't know the callery pear except from photos from my emergency plant identification group, since dogs seem to eat the fruits quite often (probably because they're so common). But there are many fascinating stories like this with invasive species, of good intentions without much thought to future consequences and of conflicting values between people who love the plants (or animals) and people who hate them, both with good reason. I once spent 2 1/2 hours being berated by Golden Bay residents because the local Department of Conservation office had cut and sprayed some hydrangeas planted at a remote part of the Kahurangi National Park.
It always amuses me when people are surprised that plants don't do exactly what humans want them to do. Sure, there are a few species which we've bent to our will but most of them stubbornly do not. The Judeo-Christian idea of 'dominion over plants and animals' has led western cultures into some pretty poor decision-making.
So true Melanie, it is one of my bug bears too. As is getting really pissed at people importing seeds because 'they were really pretty where they grew o/s' ...Wth?
Lol tho I also remember a lecturer at Massey telling us 'A weed is just a plant growing where it's not wanted' so a rose is a weed if it's growing in a potato patch ....& vice-versa.
Give me a native tree anyday even if it is growing where you want to plant your bloody hydrangeas or godforbid agapanthus!!
When I started reading this, I was sure it was going to be about the Ailanthus altissima (Tree of Heaven). They grow like weeds up here in the LA foothills and they smell! They don't even need flowers to smell. I let one grow only to discover they shoot out small trees from their roots which were popping up 20 feet from the original tree, ready to create their own forest in my small yard. I think I've finally removed all of it, but have to be diligent.
💯. We've been battling those super invasive stinky trees for years! And I see them growing everywhere like a weed... In parking lots and street medians, etc. Tree of Heaven...most ironically named tree...
I'd just like to note, as Charlie did in the comments below, that there has been a scientific paper comparing the odor of the Callery pear tree and cum. Amazing stuff:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt4jc348xn/qt4jc348xn_noSplash_bd50df57ceb3336501f299bb3d4055fa.pdf
Contains the heading "SEMEN ODORANTS"
10/10
My wine brain was wondering which volatile compounds the two have in common 🤣
In my old townhouse subdivision, three of my neighbors had Bradford pear trees in their front yards. We had a cherry tree. Four years later, I think we were the only house in that block that still had a tree. The Bradford pears fell victim to tropical storms, high winds, and snow/ice.
I feel like the Bradford pear might be a metaphor for America these days. Looks pretty, smells bad, poisons the ground, invades other places, and has to be held together with duct tape and string.
I wish I'd included this revelation in my piece. But here it happily sits.
Well observed.
OMG so much. Or the planned obsolescence of the global economy.
There's one on my neighborhood walking route, and I thought I was the only one repulsed by it!
My unscientific theory: the past didn't smell great to begin with. Most of us remember the cigarette smell that permeated our childhoods- whether it was in our own home or a restaurant, airplane, or nightclub we snuck into as a teen. Life stinks, literally! Our modern antiperspirants were patented as late as the 1940s. People used to have so.much.carpeting in their homes. Pets amplify the problem. If you're desensitized to bad smells, the Bradford is just a pretty tree.
I don't know why people would plant one today. Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.
I am really on board with this stinky 40s theory. Fuck I love the comments section!
Smoking permeated so much. I was in my early twenties when the smoking ban came in and suddenly it was horrifying how much the smoking had been covering up the smell of farts on the dance floor.
Ha! Can I ask where this was? Like, was this a club on a cabbage farm??
I wish I could remember what places smelled like after the smoking ban went into effect where I lived. I was at university at the time. I do remember being happy that I no longer had to wash my hair after going out.
And not just the dance floor! 😉
That's a genius theory of why they didn't notice the smell.
This is fascinating. Here in North Carolina, the state forest service and other groups are offering bounties for homeowners to remove and replace their Bradford pears due to competition with native species and concerns over how they impact the local ecosystems. If a homeowner gets rid of their Bradford, they get a free native tree to plant in its place! https://forestry.ces.ncsu.edu/2023/02/nc-bradford-pear-bounty/
Now if only America could do this with its guns!
Other states/municipalities have done that with the Ginkgo tree, or at least limited to one gender to limit natural propagation (as it is a gendered tree). Apparently the female version of the tree has some unpleasant smells when fertilized fruits grow.
Ginko fruits ripen and drop on the ground, when they split open they smell like feces! There was a Ginko tree on my street when I was a teenager and in warm summer weather I had to cross to the other side of the street, the smell was so bad!
I always thought they smelled of vomit, but smells are subjective and things often smell different to different people. The bad smell is from a chemical called butryric acid which is also present in vomit.
The same stuff that is (essentially) added to Hershey's chocolate? 🤢
Now I've gone down a research rabbit hole. Wow! I could waste my afternoon trying to get to the bottom of that story but sadly I have other work to do. Fascinating anyway.
Interesting. I have always very specifically categorised the smell as "dog feces".
Because I find these things interesting, I looked it up and butyric acid is one of the volatile components of dog poo.
Not me following my dog around today to verify this 😆
It's for science!
Do not forget the rarely flowering and extremely pungent Corpse Flower at NC State, which last bloomed in June 2023: https://cals.ncsu.edu/corpse-flower-nc-state/ https://cals.ncsu.edu/news/a-big-stinking-premiere/
I wondered why Raleigh was smelling so bad last year. I always thought it was the traffic on 540. Joking. Before I moved to Charlotte I remember hearing about that.
There are quite a few species with corpse/ carrion smelling flowers, but this one is particularly fascinating because it's so huge.
We have one in the DC Botanical Gardens and Oh MAN it is awful.
NC native here and I have vaguely wondered why I don't notice as many Bradford pears these days. Thanks for the info!
Good riddance to them, too!
I never knew that. I knew we had bounties on coyotes but not that. Interesting.
> 60 years after the Cum Tree was first brought to America, two planes hit the World Trade Centre in New York.
Okay adding this fact to my evidence wall
I was really proud of that line.
I’m not sure if it’s the same tree, but there’s definitely a tree that smells like cum in Aotearoa. It used to freak me out when I was a teenager, I thought everyone could smell that I’d been jerking off. I was immensely relieved when I found out it was a tree.
Okay, that got a good laugh out of me. And NZ definitely has this tree, just in less numbers. So - I think you were / are safe.
It was outside one of my classroom windows. I would sit in class sweating buckets, wondering how the hell it smelled so strong. I can laugh about it now but also, fuck that tree.
Haha. Ah! So good.
I legit laughed reading this.
Thank you for making me giggle today! I needed some levity. Your image caption: "Frank Nicholas Meyer looking for disgusting trees to bring back to America." made me smile and the line:
"America won’t give up its guns, but it’ll give up its Cum Trees." made me straight up cackle!!
Also...I feel like cum should smell better. Just saying.
Maybe we need to start watering these Cum Trees with pineapple juice? I feel like I've heard that's helped with humans? LOL!
I read the first sentence of this piece and went "oh, David met the tree"
Hahahahahahahahaha
I love that “My cum smells like blossoming flowers” is a factual statement for men everywhere. Also, I sincerely hope that the person who makes that ‘Jacob Elordi’s bath water’ candle used the Callery Pear as the base note.
(like blossoming flowers that are attractive to... a fly)
Oh my god, I can't believe no one is talking about the bees!! I live in North Alabama and these trees absolutely *surrounded* our schools and parks when I was a kid (late 90s-early 2000s.) My elementary school and middle school were connected buildings and these trees were right next to the entrances and lined the sidewalk/car pick up lanes. Not only were we all practically choking on the smell, we were fucking swarmed by BEES. Like, hundreds of bees! Every single year! It was terrifying! There were so many times that recess was moved into the gym or cancelled entirely because the playground was a fucking war zone!
On top of that, we have this whole "Keep Alabama Beautiful" initiative (https://keepalabamabeautiful.org) and the classes rotated volunteering. Some years we had to entirely re-plant the flowers/bushes in front of the school, which I now know is because the trees probably killed them all! And we also re-planted the fucking trees!
I really, really cannot stress enough how many fucking bees there were.
So... how many bees?
"There's nothing so bad
that we can't over cum it" 😳
InnoScent Survivor Tree poet.
Beautiful. Should be its own separate plaque at the memorial.
Clarification:
I was not so much inspired by, but rather quoting directly from the The Survivor Tree🌳 - the final line to be exact.
The (forgive me) happy ending.
For sure the actual poet never saw the double entendre cumming, let alone wished for it to be spelled out in memoriam.
I'd never encountered the Cum Tree when I was growing up, until I finished high school and moved to Christchurch.
I remember standing in front of my then work building, waiting for a courier, and smelling that funky shit wafting through the air. I was a bit confused at first as I couldn't pin the smell. Was that Janola? No, something else.
Just then my boss walked past, and without thinking I go "Can you smell jizz?"
He just looked at me like I'd had a head injury and carried on walking.
Incredible.
Also a lot of Worms in these comments from Christchurch - seems to be a city that's really taken the Cum Tree to heart.
My Dad (a wholesale nursery grower of 40+ years) has grown these for garden centre's and town planners for years, even has his own clone out there on the rise. The reason town planners like them is they are upright and don't shed too much rubbish onto sidewalks as the pears on the ornamental varieties aren't edible and too small to make much mess. I have grafted them and can confirm the understock species have massive spikes on them, but the grafted tree does not. I have a very limited sense of smell so can't say I've noticed the semen scent and I'm thankful for that😅 they are still flying out the door and he can't grow enough of them to meet supply. I've not heard of them being an invasive species in New Zealand though and Doc is very hard on Plant growers here, we get visits often to make sure we aren't growing anything that will fuck the environment. Anyway that's a growers perspective😁
Some excellent behind-the-curtain stuff here, Julez. His own clone even!
I just hope your father is aware of the smell he is spreading. I hold him, and him alone, accountable!
Haha I'll tell him🤣 he's defiantly perpetuating the problem. That will be an interesting discussion 😊
My first introduction to grafted trees was very recently when I was wondering why the lemon tree had these massive eff-off spikes on some of the branches...and also these weird oranges growing out of them?!
Oh we had a grapefruit go the same way, totally out-grew the grafted tree.🤦♀️
To my knowledge they aren't wild here at all (I've checked the sources which might indicate they were). Doesn't mean they won't be in future though.
To true, just look at what gorse has done😬 After some trials growing Pyrus understock from seed I believe we have too mild a climate to scarify the seed to become a problem but defiantly bares keeping in mind for all plants not endemic to NZ👍
I don't know the callery pear except from photos from my emergency plant identification group, since dogs seem to eat the fruits quite often (probably because they're so common). But there are many fascinating stories like this with invasive species, of good intentions without much thought to future consequences and of conflicting values between people who love the plants (or animals) and people who hate them, both with good reason. I once spent 2 1/2 hours being berated by Golden Bay residents because the local Department of Conservation office had cut and sprayed some hydrangeas planted at a remote part of the Kahurangi National Park.
It always amuses me when people are surprised that plants don't do exactly what humans want them to do. Sure, there are a few species which we've bent to our will but most of them stubbornly do not. The Judeo-Christian idea of 'dominion over plants and animals' has led western cultures into some pretty poor decision-making.
So true Melanie, it is one of my bug bears too. As is getting really pissed at people importing seeds because 'they were really pretty where they grew o/s' ...Wth?
Lol tho I also remember a lecturer at Massey telling us 'A weed is just a plant growing where it's not wanted' so a rose is a weed if it's growing in a potato patch ....& vice-versa.
Give me a native tree anyday even if it is growing where you want to plant your bloody hydrangeas or godforbid agapanthus!!
When I started reading this, I was sure it was going to be about the Ailanthus altissima (Tree of Heaven). They grow like weeds up here in the LA foothills and they smell! They don't even need flowers to smell. I let one grow only to discover they shoot out small trees from their roots which were popping up 20 feet from the original tree, ready to create their own forest in my small yard. I think I've finally removed all of it, but have to be diligent.
💯. We've been battling those super invasive stinky trees for years! And I see them growing everywhere like a weed... In parking lots and street medians, etc. Tree of Heaven...most ironically named tree...
I don't know that tree, but a Ginkgo smells like dog shit and vomit. Quite a few around Bay of Plenty at least.