Wake Robin

Each night, for the last week, the heady fragrance of trillium has wafted up to the bedroom. Up some five metres comes the perfume from the eight flowerheads. I’m not a chemist but I do wonder about the concentration levels of the compounds that transmit olfactory pleasure over such a distance. I think these things walking in the park when socially distant hair shampoo and personal perfumes waft over me. The fear of covid should have changed us all.

Wake robin is another common name for the three petalled trillium, a name I’d never heard before. Watch out if buying one, some smell of decay after death rather than shampoo after shower.