My garage reeks of parmesan. Reminding me of a fine Italian dinner, it’s a great smell, just surprising. I’m neither making nor aging cheese where I store my lawnmower, garden tools, canoes, and keep a supply of firewood along one wall. But I recently stacked some freshly cut and split white oak. It smells for all the world like parmesan.
Like most of us, I’m surrounded by wood every day. It’s in furniture and floors, doors and window frames, tool handles, and the clapboard siding of my home. From a sculpture of the Buddha to a kitchen spoon, the beauty and utility of wood is part of daily life. I often admire its grain, color, feel, and capacity to be shaped into fine details, but not since I stepped into an old-fashioned cedar closet years ago have I thought much about the scent of wood.
Of course, the primal place for wood scents are forests. Take a walk in the woods, especially on a humid day or after a rainstorm, and smells abound for those inclined to focus with their noses. The bright aroma of pine needs no special awareness and can buoy the dourest mood. No wonder it’s used in air fresheners. Spruce smell is bracing, and a snapped black birch branch is the essence of wintergreen. The crunch of autumn leaves on sunny November afternoons offers sweet nuttiness with every step.
Scents in a forest can be complex and fleeting, but as I discovered with my “cheesy” garage, fresh split or sawn wood is where smells are most intense. The fresher the wood, the more pronounced the smell. Some woods are spicy, others sweet. They can be minty, fruity or taste like various foods. Every wood seems to have a distinct odor as much as they have a distinct grain.
Jody Bronson, a long-time forester and woodsman from western Connecticut, has occasion to operate a small sawmill. Over the years he’s milled many different woods into boards, some common, others you won’t find at your average lumber yard. White pine smells like bubble gum, sassafras like root beer, and concolor fir has a citrusy scent, he told me. When run through a saw, the friction causes sugar maple to smell like maple syrup. Apple gives off the odor of apple cider vinegar, black locust smells like steamed green beans, and tulip trees like limes. After a while, with sawdust in the air, Bronson says the flavors are on his tongue.
Not all wood aromas are pleasant. Old time timber framers call red oak “piss wood” because it’s spicy, ammonia-like scent is a vague reminder of stale urine. Bronson finds red cedar irritating, black cherry, sour.
Charles Canham, a forest ecologist in New York state, has spent a lot of time thinking about trees and wood, though he finds aromas a somewhat obscure topic. As a boat builder and fine furniture maker, he agrees with Bronson that each wood has a distinctive scent. Canham believes that the common practice of kiln drying lumber diminishes those smells because the high heat drives off the volatile compounds that carry scents. He gets more intense odors when working with air-dried lumber, although even then the smell can be subtle.
Smells are well known to evoke the strongest memories. They stay with us long after other sensations have dissipated. Entering through the nose, odors take an express route to the brain’s memory and emotional centers. Some of my earliest recollections are triggered by a scent or taste in the air. I’ve found few people who celebrate Christmas with a live tree, who can walk through a stand of spruce without at some point having holiday music or family memories flash through their minds.
Knowing the power of smells to evoke and improve memory, Bronson has often used them to help teach student interns how to identify and remember the characteristics of trees. He might ask them to rub certain conifer needles or sassafras leaves in their hands and then drink in the scent, or to break a twig and sniff. Just one of many ways to teach about the woods, it amplifies the more traditional methods at his disposal, adds another dimension. Once you break off a piece of black birch and take a breath of wintergreen, you never forget what that tree looks like, Bronson says.
Wood can be so much more than a visual or tactile experience. It can register with all the senses—even hearing, if you ask a luthier. But smell and taste may be our most intimate exposure to wood. I start thinking this way, and new avenues of experience arise.
Woody scents are said to be earthy, warm and heartening, characteristics needed with ever-growing urgency in these frenetic and fragmented times. Could trees be sending us messages about their molecular makeup or the characteristics of their lives even after their substance is separated from the roots? I don’t know. But maybe we should be paying attention.