It’s easy to rush through campus without noticing the little details around us, but sometimes the scent of a flower in the breeze makes me pause. Watching flowers is like meditation for me; they give me small moments of peace — their scent makes me stop and take in nature even when I’m in a hurry.
At the end of a class, I immediately walked to visit a flower whose complex scent had been lingering in my mind. I thought about all the poems, still-life paintings of flowers and the slight cliché ache I feel when I see someone holding a bouquet.
For this piece, I want to take you through some of the best-smelling flowers I’ve discovered this season around the Hopkins campus, offering just a glimpse of the rich botanical wonders that surround us.
I should mention that I have no expertise in botany and have chosen not to learn the official names of these flowers. Instead, I’ve named them after the place or thing their scent reminds me of.
I also want to give special thanks to my peer and friend Jewels Seeger, who joined me and shared her thoughts on the flowers’ scents, helping to balance my subjective impressions. Her insights have shaped this article and made our walk together an absolute delight.
Grocery Store Stockroom, by the sign marking Homewood House
In front of Homewood House, there is a flower that smells like what old cardboard in a grocery store stockroom smells like — something slightly rotting and sweetly stale, but pleasant. It smells maybe like an empty ice cream carton left in the freezer for too long. Plants seem to rot differently than animals — in a way that isn’t horrendous.
COURTESY OF SOPHIA SEGERSTROM
Hearth, by the Johns Hopkins Club building
Their dry warmth and sweet scent remind me of California chaparrals and the mantle of a fireplace. It smells just like would you would imagine the sound of the word “hearth” would smell like.
COURTESY OF SOPHIA SEGERSTROM
Cradle, between Ames and Levering Halls
The scent of these flowers reminds me of baby powder and the distant memory of being a child, everything pink and cotton. It also brings back memories of a CD I once had, “Soothing Beach Sounds for Babies,” and the wonder I felt when, by pressing my ear to a seashell, I could hear the sound of waves.
COURTESY OF SOPHIA SEGERSTROM
Fake Fruit, in front of Ames Hall
The flowers smell faint, but the leaves, when gently plucked and torn, have a thick green scent of mint but also of fake fruit... like a fruit-flavored vape. We boldly tasted it, and it was slightly numbing and cooling on our tongues. Jewels pointed out a gum-like scent and aftertaste.
COURTESY OF SOPHIA SEGERSTROM
Closet of Day-Old Clothes, at the stairway between Keyser and Wyman Quads
This one reminds me of the smell of old Neosporin and sweaters, or maybe a closet where a day’s worn sweater lingers with perfume, or the slight sweetness of a stranger’s perfume and sweat passing you on the sidewalk, as their scent trails behind them.
COURTESY OF SOPHIA SEGERSTROM
Dessert at the Bottom of a Deep Purple Lake, at the end of Decker Quad
The smell of these flowers could be, distantly, a peach rotting on a humid, pesticide-sprayed orchard ground. But, it also has some obscured depth, like the bottom of a purple lake. I image I would smell this same sent if I were to smell dessert at the bottom of a lake. Jewels brilliantly connects it to bread saturated in wine.
COURTESY OF SOPHIA SEGERSTROM
Basement Drawer, in front of Hodson Hall
At first, it smells like dust and spices, then like my grandma’s basement in Sweden which I haven’t visited in many years. The basement has drawers that haven’t been opened in years, full of scraps of wood, metals, washers, bolts and screws that are oily and covered in dust. My father and I once made a toy car out of these scraps. This is a flower I will keep coming back to.
COURTESY OF SOPHIA SEGERSTROM
In Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking, she writes, “It’s the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.” I think similarly about the detours I’ve made to smell flowers — how they refused to be predictable and the memories they bring back. I hope you find some of the flowers I’ve described above and that their scents lead you to moments of pause and reflection as they have for me.
