Welcome to You Ask Andy

 

Mary Lean, age 11, of Tronoto, Ont.,

How do flowers make their perfume?

Every fragrant plant has its own recipe for making perfume. There is .a vast difference between the recipes used by the rose and the violet. In fact, no two flower fragrances are alike. However, all the various perfumes are made from the same basic ingredients. They are plant sugars made by green leaves and chemicals from the soil.

The whole plant is built of these ingredients. The process begins with photosynthesis ‑ the sunlight recipe. Green chlorophyll works to make sugar from air, water and sunshine, Every green leaf does this through all the daylight hours, But so far, we have been unable to learn the secret recipe.

Sugar making stops when the sun goes down'. The plants get busy processing the sugars into other substances. Some interact with the chemicals toted up from the soil by the sap. Some of the substances made are very complex.

Cellulose is made for the building of woody cells. Some sugar is converted into starch for storage. Some is converted into fats and proteins, often to supply seeds with concentrated food. Even colors are manufactured from plant sugars and chemicals in the soil. For a flower must be gayly dressed.

Many flowers add perfume to their good grooming. The perfumes too, is made from plant sugar and chemicals from the soil. The perfumes are very complex substances in the form of special oils. The oils are called volatile or ethereal, which means that they evaporate easily. This is necessary to spread the flower fragrance into the air.

It is also necessary to keep the precious perfume oils from evaporating too fast. For this reason, they are kept in special cells called perfume sacs. In the roses the perfume sacs are scattered throughout the delicate tissues of the  tissues of the petals. Rose perfume is a delicate blend of three different~ groups of substances.

Other plants carry pockets of fragrance in their leaves, stems, roots bark, fruit peels and even seed pods. Each uses a different recipe which makes its perfume unique in the plant kingdom.

The lemon and citrus plants carry gobs of oil in the peel of the fruit. The nutmeg; bitter almond and anise add perfume to their hard seed coverings. Lavender and peppermint add perfume sacs in leaves as well as flowers. The geranium and cinnamon add their own special perfume to their leaves and stems, Sassafras carries perfume in its roots. Ginger carries perfume in its rootstocks„

The number of different plant fragrances in the world is countless. Each is a perfect and original blend of simple ingredients. But so far we have been able to figure out the recipes for only a very few of them.

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