Why do Flowers Have A Scent?
I know you might not be able to relate because you probably haven’t ever gotten or given flowers and if you have, how many times? Really, how many times?
In Nigeria here, I haven’t seen many florist shops like there are in American movies. Flowers are like an everyday accessory. Flowers are given to mothers, daughters, teachers, wives or girlfriends, sick people, when you’re visiting someone and dead people.
Flowers are such a thing that people even have favourite flowers. Apart from rose, lily, daisy, tulips and the white ones used for weddings; what other kinds of flowers do you know? What kinds have you held? Nurtured? Smelt?
One of the characteristics flowers have is that they smell; which ranges from sweet to not-so-sweet but a lot of them give off an enchanted fragrance that can sweep you away from the harsh realities of life as it is to a place where you wished life was a bed or roses -Utopia.
Flowers emit these scents to attract pollinators. So, pollination (remember Integrated Science? No? What exactly do you remember from school?) is the transfer of pollen grains from the anther to the stigma of a flower. This is how fertilization in plants happen and how seeds are produced.
So, the scent we human beings enjoy so much from flowers, agents of pollination like butterfly, insects and birds see as work and assignment. A typical case of one man’s pleasure is another man’s job.
While we stick our noses into some flowers we are giving or receiving, remember that the scent we enjoy and hope the receiver enjoys too was meant for a bat or a monarch butterfly.
