Blossoms

The summer holidays are here! A time when parents of small children find themselves exploring every park in their local vicinity, quite probably several times (whilst hoping against hope that it doesn’t rain). On just such a quest myself, I recently visited one particular park that was filled with a gorgeous smell.

What was it? A bit of sniffing around quickly identified this tree. Now, I am not a botanist (or even much of a gardener), so I immediately resorted to the rather wonderful Seek app by iNaturalist, which uses some very clever image recognition software to identify plants and animals (disclaimer: accuracy is not guaranteed — don’t eat anything based on this app!)

Seek told me that this was a lime tree, or a linden (genus Tilia). A bit of cross-referencing (thanks Dad!) suggested that it had identified the tree correctly. It’s not an uncommon plant: you’ll probably come across it yourself if you go looking (or smelling).

The name ‘linden’ was more familiar to me. The wood is soft and easily worked, and is used to make musical instruments because it has good acoustic properties. It’s also used to make wooden blinds and other pieces of furniture because it’s lightweight, stable, and holds stains and finishes well.

Linden blossoms can be used to make tea.

But let’s go back to the flowers and their delicious scent. The tree blooms during July and August in the Northern hemisphere. The flowers are sometimes described as mucilaginous — which is a fabulous word meaning, basically, thick and sticky. More specifically: “containing a polysaccharide substance that is extracted as a viscous or gelatinous solution and used in medicines and adhesives.”

Linden flowers are a ‘natural remedy’ with a list of applications in herbal medicine as long as your arm. They contain lots of different substances. One that comes up a lot is farnesol, which is actually a type of alcohol. Of course, it’s nothing like the alcohol we’re familiar with from drinks, which is the much simpler ethanol — but it’s important to remember that ‘alcohol’ actually refers to a class of compounds (which, in simple terms, contain an -OH group like the one in the image here) and not a single substance.

The chemical structure of farnesol

Farnesol turns up in lots of essential oils, such as citronella, rose and lemon grass. It’s used in perfumes to enhance floral scents. But plants don’t make substances just to please humans (well, it’s complicated…). It acts as a pheromone for several insects. Sometimes this doesn’t work out so well for the insects, as it confuses their mating behaviour and effectively acts as a natural pesticide. On the other hand, it actively encourages others: bumblebees release farnesol when they return to the hive to spur other bees into action. It’s the bee equivalent of shouting, ‘oi! Move it you lot, pollen this way!’

Farnesol acts as a pheromone for bumblebees.

Linden flowers also contain one of my all-time favourite chemicals, benzaldehyde. That’s the one that smells of almonds and isn’t a deadly cyanide salt. Its delicious almondy-ness is the reason it’s used as a flavouring and scent, but it’s also a starting material for loads of different chemicals, for example the dye malachite green, which is used to give a green colour to leather, fabric and paper. A form of this dye called ‘brilliant green‘ is mixed with a second, violet, dye to make ‘Bonney’s blue,’ a disinfectant dye used to mark skin for surgeries. Benzaldehyde is also used to make styrene, which is of course used to make the well-known packing material, polystyrene.

And these are just a couple of the substances found in those yummy-smelling flowers. They also contain arabinogalactans, uronic acid, tannins, rutin, hyperoside, quercitrin, isoquercitrin, astragalin and others. In short, a veritable cocktail of different chemicals.

So next time you smell the scent of a lovely flower, just think about all the amazing chemical substances the plant is making. All natural, of course!

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