CornellWatch

Few things should feel as idyllically collegiate as a walk down Ho Plaza in the springtime. The skies are blue and the trees are in bloom. The only problem is that recently, the Plaza has been smelling like that time in summer camp when I brought a dead crab for show and tell and left it in my cubby for a month.

What is that malodorous aroma? An equally disturbed friend and I had a hunch that it came from those beautiful white, blooming trees. After all, that was the only thing that had changed recently on the Plaza.

According to “Recommended Urban Trees: A Cornell Campus Walk”, a guide to the trees on Cornell’s campus put together by the Urban Horticulture Institute, these suspect trees are Callery Pears. Callery Pears came to the US from China less than a century ago and are considered to be an invasive species. Its bark is used to make woodwind instruments and it is one of the first trees to flower in the spring.

Professor William Crepet, the Chair of the Department of Plant Biology, confirmed that the Callery Pears are to blame. Though he hasn’t been to Ho Plaza recently, he guessed that they were “a cultivar of Pyrus calleryana,” or, in the language of us common folk, Callery Pears. He thinks that they’re probably of the aristocrat variety. “Yes the flowers smell bad,” he wrote in an e-mail, “the smell is an attractant to pollinators. It is a tradeoff of course: they look very nice flanking Ho Plaza, they are beautiful in flower, they flower profusely, they grow well and relatively rapidly.”

Many have tried to identify exactly what the putrid odor of the Callery Pear flower smells like. The writer of the Callery Pear Wikipedia article reservedly calls it “a sickly sweet smell.” Another online encyclopedia attempts to get more specific, saying, “they have a sickly-sweet smell that some have likened to semen, decaying crab meat, or jasmine and dog vomit.” Another, less official commentator, wrote on a message board about the trees “I always thought they smelled like uncooked corn tortillas…”

Fortunately, the rancid smell will not be around for much longer. The flowers usually only last for a few weeks, until the tree’s leaves emerge.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 5:22 pm by Rachel Louise Ensign and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.