Botany

From the seventeenth-century onwards, the field of botany gradually emerged from the broader umbrella of natural history. Loosely defined as the study of plants, botany often coincides with horticulture (i.e., growing and caring for living plants), but not necessarily so. In fact, for botanists living in the early-modern period, it would have been impossible to grow many of the newly 'discovered' tropical plants being brought to Europe, unless they could afford the most cutting-edge glasshouse technology – and even with that equipment, success was far from guaranteed. Instead, botanists either had to travel to study the plants in-situ, or else try to acquire a preserved specimen of a plant – which was usually a dried and pressed specimen.

The methods with which botanists have preserved plants has changed very little over the centuries. The main option has always been, and still is, to press a plant specimen until it has dried out, and then glue or otherwise mount it onto paper. A collection of such records is known as an herbarium. Occasionally some specimens that cannot be easily pressed are preserved in an enclosed jar of spirit (although this technique is more common with preserved animals). The desire to capture what a plant looks like when it's alive as accurately as possible has meant that traditionally many botanists were also artists, or (for those without this skill) worked with specialist botanical artists.  For example, in recollecting his first voyage to the pacific, Joseph Banks described how the botanist Daniel Solander and a draftsman had joined him in order to help him study and capture plants while they were fresh. They had to move quickly, with the draftsman drawing the plant while Banks and Solander made 'rapid descriptions' of the specimens. Only after the plants had wilted did they go back to 'complete [their] descriptions'. They studied each day 'from about 8a.m. to 2p.m.' taking a break to wait for the 'smell of food' to disappear, before continuing from around 4pm to dark. It is unclear exactly why the smell of food interfered with their studying, but the fact that it did demonstrates the importance of smell for botanists studying plants (Chambers: 2000).

As well as collecting plants to study, a vital part of botanic practice is to successfully identify them. There are several taxonomies for organising plants into different groups (and naming them accordingly), including one of the earliest from the ancient Greek physician Dioscorides (c.40-90 AD).  The first volume of Dioscorides' five-volume pharmacopeia of medicinal plants, De Materia Medica, is dedicated to 'Aromatics', indicating that even at this early juncture proto-botanists (and quite possibly people more generally) recognised the significance of smell to understanding plants. De Materia Medica remained in circulation from its creation (c.50-70AD) well into the seventeenth-century before it was finally supplanted by contemporary books that then began to proliferate on the subject.

However, there was no agreed standardised approach to naming plants until the mid-eighteenth century, when Carl Linnaeus' binomial taxonomic system was published. It has since prevailed as the formally recognised system for naming and grouping plants - at least within academe. However, it is important to recognise that both before and since the Linnean binomial system took hold, there were (and still are) several co-existing naming practices from within different cultures and communities across the world.

Regardless of what taxonomic system a botanist uses, or what language(s) is/are used to name a plant, the main thing is to correctly identify a plant within whatever taxonomic system is being used.  This is obviously still true today, but it was particularly crucial in an era prior to the existence of technologies like DNA sampling. Botanists must therefore take the time to study a plant with all of their senses to ensure a correct identification – relying on sight alone could lead to misattribution – which could have potentially dire consequences in the instance of a poisonous plant being misidentified.

The various smells of plants are almost endless, so this entry will limit itself to the smells related to identifying and studying plants (as opposed to simply commenting on a scent), as well as some of the smells surrounding the primary botanic practices – namely preserving specimens.