Monday, March 10, 2008

Ahh...petrichor


Hanna at This Garden is Illegal.com wrote about garden aromatherapy.:

It might interest you to learn that the smell of dirt is not in fact the smell of dirt. It is a bacteria called Streptomyces coelicolor which produces a chemical called geosmin which in turn is what we think of as the smells like dirt. Actually, the bacteria produces that smell when it is dying.

Another smell I like is petrichor:

More specifically, it’s the pleasant smell that often accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions. Didn’t you always want a word for it? It was named by two Australian researchers in an article in Nature in 1964, who discovered that the smell is an oily essence that comes from rocks or soil that are often (but not always) clay-based. The oil is a complicated set of at least fifty different compounds, rather like a perfume. It turned out that the oils are given off by vegetation during dry spells and are adsorbed on to the surface of rocks and soil particles, to be released into the air again by the next rains. ... The word comes from Greek petros, a stone, plus ichor, from the Greek word for the fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods. So the word means something like “essence of rock”. Alas, it is rarely encountered.


The definitions came from worldwidewords.org which I found on onelook.com. Image from sugarmtnfarm.com. I love the internet.