What A Surprise!

This morning on my walkabout I was admiring Gardeners Youjiro cross and saying to myself .. they look way to pretty not to have a fragrance, so I stuck my nose in one not expecting anything and lo and behold they DID have a fragrance. To be sure it wasn't just a fluke I stuck my nose in all of them and they had a fragrance. My brain said bergamot with a little hint of tea rose. Now the fragrance was very light but definitely there.

Excited I ran to my other morning glorys and did the sniff test .. nothing. Went back to the Youjiro cross and there it was again!

This was the first JMG I have grown .. would others who are growing them please see if yours has a fragrance?

X

I have a pretty good nose and have never noticed a fragrance. I'll start checking.

Wow X, I never noticed that! Next time I grow another batch I`ll have to see..or sniff to check that out. That sounds marvelous no doubt. :)

Karen

I could check the parent plants too because I`m keeping strains of both of them as pure as nature will allow with hand pollinating and an eye on do they look right. I`ll keep that in mind for sure.

Be sure to mark the best vines and tie a few blooms. You might still find some other variations but these bloom so quick you can usually segregate them pretty easily.

Karen

Well apparently the fragrance is time sensitive .. i went out an hour later and they were starting to wilt and it was gone. They were just at their peak when I noticed it!!!

I'll double check it tomorrow and make sure I wasn't hallucinating.

X

This message was edited Sep 28, 2007 1:01 PM

I was also getting a fragrance a couple of months ago, but couldn't tell where exactly it was coming from.. I had some Mt Fuji no momo also had some Astrolocia plants, and I. setosa in the same area.. so, I came to the conclusion it must have been the leaves of the Astrolocia gigantia (my spelling is awful), but when I get it up to my nose, it doesn't have the same odor. So, I Believe you may have something there.

A.

I used extract essential oils way back when .. The hard part of extracting essential oils from plants with light delicate fragrances is you need lots n lots of flowers. If I confirm tomorrow I wasn't hallucinating and they do have a scent, I just might try next spring to see if I can extract the fragrance.

Distillation is the best for extracting essential oils, but it's very time consuming so I use the oil method. You'll need two mason size jars with lids and cheese cloth. I take sweet almond oil and put it in a mason jar. I then take the flowers with their fragrance at their peak and gently bruise them between my fingers and pack them into the jar with the oil and shake it up til all the petals are covered. I keep the jar in a dark warm place (top of a hot water heater is good) for 24 hours then strain the oil/flower mixture through washed cheese cloth (to wash the cheese cloth, use an unscented soap then rinse in white vinegar/water mixture to get all the soap out then rinse in plain, filtered water or distilled water that has no chlorine) into another jar and repeat what I did. For really light delicate fragrances it usually takes about 20-30 sessions to impart a strong enough fragrance into the oil.

If you're interested in trying this, start off with something easy with a strong fragrance like roses or honeysuckle. The time to pick the flowers is usually early to mid morning when the fragrance is the strongest.

X

This message was edited Sep 28, 2007 1:26 PM

I should set this up in the lab at work. It would smell much better than the formic acid some idiot a few benches away is using!

Lol .. well you have distillers available so you should go that route and probably have better success .. do a search .. there are all sorts of links on essential oil distillation.

X

Well .. I wasn't hallucinating .. Gardeners Youjiro cross has a fragrance!!!!!!!!

X

X,

Looking at your pictures those look like the ukigumo youjiro x kikyo. I gathered you a mixed lot of seeds from the ukigumo youjiro x kikyo growout in my thread from a marked vine and also some seeds from a vine that was a cross with one of the ukigumo x youjiro and a picotee in an attempt to get a double flower.

They may or may not carry for doubling or (absence of genes) for solid so don`t be surprised if you get solids,singles,doubles and more blizzard and spoked ones as well. You can pick through and keep the ones you like. To me that is fun. I love the selecting and finding stuff.

A funny thing is I grew these close to my roses. The baby blue blizzard one crawled its way through and looked so pretty blooming in with the pink roses I couldn`t remove it right away! I`m sure that has nothing to do with the fragrance of the little blue flowers. lol

I still wonder if they wanted to keep up with their neighbors so they developed a fragrance. Nah, I think maybe the JMG flowers do have a light dewy fragrance on many of them. We just don`t notice it because we don`t expect them to have a smell.

Now it would be a great idea to begin noticing and breeding the flowers that have a noticable fragrance. That would be a great idea. :)

Karen

Hmmm...with the exception of the very small flowered species I've always put my nose to all of the flowers and I detect a scent in all of them...Ipomoea purpurea,Ipomoea tricolor and all of the Ipomoea nil...Ipomoea indica etc...

If anyone does not detect the scent I bet they are smokers...

The scent is usually most apparent when the nectar production is at max which is relatively soon after opening...the strongest scented I.nil that I've encountered were some of the speckled ones Kanoko and Fuji shibori...

TTY,...

Ron

P.S. - The flowers have volatiles in them that affect your hypothalamus even if you don't consciously detect anything...

I went out this morning and some of them did have a more noticable fragrance than the others. Some of them smelled like fresh dug up dirt to me and others had a pleasant very light fruity almost spicy smell I liked. That will be something I`ll have to start noticing more for sure! That would be a big plus when selecting flowers I want to grow again. Karen

This message was edited Sep 29, 2007 2:29 PM

I wouldn't call any of them truly fragrant > like something that a person could easily detect from a long distance but sometimes I can detect the scent when I have a group of plants in the house...

The 'scent' I am referring to when outside must be detected by placing your nose right into the flower and sniffing...

The scents I detect range from spicy(some nils) to fruity (tricolor) to something like ladies makeup...e.g. the round picotees (nil) have the old ladies face powder smell...

TTY,...

Ron