Fragrant Plant Skeletons
Some dried-out stalks and leaves can be identified by smell
Strong-smelling plants keep traces of their odor even after months of drying out, and by simply rubbing and sniffing the leaves or seed heads, we can identify the plant.
Plant skeletons, the dried-out remains of tall weeds, provide a fascinating subject for winter study, and smell offers an aid to identification in some cases.
Tansy, whose feathery foliage and bright yellow buttonlike flowers make it easy to identify in late summer, also has an intense aroma that startles the nose and is vigorous enough to repel insects. (When ants invade the house in spring, they can be discouraged by a scattering of tansy leaves. The fresh leaves take a day to discourage the ants and continue to work for about a week before they need to be exchanged for new ones.) In winter, the clustered buttons are shrunken and brown but still round and nearly flat on top. The serrated leaflets have curled up toward the leaf stems and hang in graceful arcs. If you find a skeleton of this description, crush a button and smell it—the odor, weaker now, is still the clincher.
Mugwort tends to grow in dense stands, usually four to six feet tall. The dried, twisted leaves, still whitish on the underside, hang straight down from the bowing stalks, which are topped by strands of the tiny tan bulblets that used to hold the seeds. Rub a leaf, and you will detect a faint medicinal smell typical of the genus Artemisia, which also includes wormwood, southernwood, and a number of ornamental garden plants.
Yarrow’s leaves, finer and even more feathery than tansy’s in summer, now hang shrunken and bedraggled, the pointy ends of the leaflets bristling at odd angles. The flowers on their upward-pointing branchlets have been replaced by brushlike clumps of overlapping scales that still have the plant’s dry, intoxicating scent. In some cases, the scales have dropped, leaving behind a lovely, tiny, off-white cone, stippled with brown.
Goldenrod has a milder smell that might be too faint to detect once the plant dries out, but occasionally you get a whiff by rubbing a leaf. Its fuzzy clusters of seeds sit atop stalks up to six feet high, but more often about thigh height. Dense stands of goldenrod make a subtly gorgeous texture in fields throughout North America.
