Recycled funk: Those stinky trees

pear tree blossomsBecause of the #518funk situation this morning (which, we must say, we did not detect) -- and the season generally -- we figured it's a good time to recycle Ryan's post about the very distinct smell of flowering pear trees: What are those stinky trees? A clip:

[A]ll of the approximately 30 species of pear contain the aroma compound pentyl butanoate. I will spare you the biochemistry -- this is the compound that makes pears and apricots smell as they do. One the precursors of pentyl butanoate is butyric acid, which is present in butter, parmesan cheese and... vomit.

The callery pear was a trendy street tree for a while in many cities because of its appearance. Apparently its odor profile was much less publicized. Last year we asked Albany city forester Tom Pfeiffer about the trees:

"[The smell] was something I wasn't aware of," Pfeiffer said of the trees' rather distinctive odor. "Then we had a very warm spring day and I said, 'What is that smell? It smells like cat piss.' The temperature was about 90 and it just made that odor come out. These trees that we had so many of all of sudden... oh, my god, what did we have? So that fell off my list right about then."

It also turns out the pear trees don't hold up well under heavy snow. So between that and the stink, they've since fallen out of favor in cities.

Comments

My high school had planted these and I hated to walk outside between classes when they were in bloom. Beautiful, but man- I equated the scent to rotted fish. Since then, though, I've used it as an identification tool! Not many trees can be ID'd by smell, that's for sure.

The stench from this morning was much more like manure than how the semen trees usually smell.

Way to much stink out there this morning over way to large of an area to be those trees.

On several occasions over last several months, I've smelled a very strong smell of hydrogen sulfide (a strong maneurish smell) around the 518. Once in the Marshalls Plaza in Glenmont, once in Troy and most recently in the Delso in Albany.

Have they began test processing Bakkan crude down at the port?

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