Musings about Vetiver fragrance and melancholia

A damp Honolulu evening, my wandering fingers, and an insatiable appreciation for the smell of all things Vetiver led me to the Forest Rat's musings:

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Trees to Thoreau to Terroir

Lately I have been noticing a lot of connections among things. I think about one thing and, while researching it, I run across other interesting things that often connect to something else I've been thinking about.
Well, a couple of posts back (Silent Skies) I was hanging around a woodpile, watching the evening deepen. I commented about the unique scent of the freshly cut logs:
“To me locust wood has an earthy, mossy, slightly sweet, and almost but not quite musty scent. It reminds me of the wonderful sweet perfume of the flowers that cover the tree in white raiment each spring, only it is muted and mixed with the dark richness of the soil that feeds the tree’s inner life.”
At the same time I happened to be reading “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” I reached the end of the book and read a reprint of Emerson’s eulogy following the death of Henry Thoreau, which includes this observation:
“He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight - more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness.”
Interesting. I was just thinking about the scent of wood and its earthiness. I thought I'd look into just what makes earth (dirt, soil, mould) smell the way it does.
Even though we might not know what causes it, we've all smelled it: the smell of a freshly plowed field, or the smell of the soil when you dig a hole in the garden to plant a tree or a rose bush, or the scent on the air after a summer downpour (which smells like worms).
That scent is caused by a chemical called geosmin and it is produced by bacteria in the soil called actinomycetes. No one knows why the bacteria produce this compound or why humans find it pleasant. However, I ran into this interesting tidbit - this “friendly” bacteria can serve as an antidepressant which leads researchers to wonder whether we should spend more time playing in the dirt.
This led me to an article about how bacteria in the soil alter the composition of certain essential oils. Investigators have learned that they can alter fragrance by controlling "food" for bacteria, and conclude: “This finding may go some way to explain why the properties of Vetiver oil change significantly depending on the environment in which the Vetiver was grown.”
This path lead me through tangled vines of related words to the french word terroir. Terroir brought me back to the soil. Terroir seems to translate to something like “a sense of place” or “a taste of the soil” or, as one author wrote: somewhere-ness. It's a quality imparted to a crop, grapes in particular, by the locale in which it is grown. So some might say that part of what makes a great French wine great is that it comes from grapes grown in France, in a particular French vineyard, and maybe even in a particular section of a particular vineyard in France.
Although terroir is a complex and controversial concept in the wine world, I just like the idea that places have a taste.
In Silent Skies I wrote:
“Each species of tree has its own unique scent, just as each one has a unique grain pattern, color, and texture. Veteran woodworkers can identify species of wood by smell alone, the same way oenophiles can identify vintages. If you think about it, wooden barrels figure prominently in winemaking, and the type of wood used is critical to imparting just the right flavors and aromas.”
This was before I learned about terroir. Maybe the scent of the wood, like the taste of a wine, depends not only on the species of tree, but also on the plot that reared it. Maybe locust wood near my home has a slightly different scent than wood from Pennsylvania - I’ll bet that it does.
MDW
P.S. Another quote from Thoreau where he mixes his senses: “I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments. Dead trees love the fire.”