Their scent is pretty intense and I can't keep the cut flowers in the house either. I enjoy them out in the yard. But I've never associated them with dog poo - your husband is funny. ;o)

I'm allergic to lilies, so I can't use them in arrangements or have them planted too near a window. Because of my allergies, I'm not partial to the fragrance - it signals impending trouble to me.

But "dog pen"?? Good heavens! :)

I'm not overly fond of the smell of lilies either. I like that they have such a strong fragrance, but I don't particularly like the fragrance itself, if that makes any sense. But I don't think it's all that bad, lol!

Last year I put a big stem that had broken off in a vase in the living room, and it bothered me (too strong) but my DH loved it.

Kinda like marigolds. Most people hate the smell, but I love it. Or paperwhites - yuck! My son said they smelled like burnt rubber (and I agree, lol) but my husband and daughter love them.

And just the other day I did a bit of internet research to see if cleome would work as a cutflower, since this is my first year growing it. Most sites I found referred to it as a good cutflower, but said "it's musky odor may be offensive". Hmm, I thought. I went out and cut some and was pleasantly surprised that I like the smell!

So you're right! One man's trash...

:)
Dee

Funny story, mxk3!

Speaking of stinky flowers, try smelling a shasta daisy...it smells worse that a dogpen...nasty! Such a cheery flower, but I had to yank them...they stunk that bad!

I agree with katyrose. Shasta Daisies do stink worse than "dogpen" but love them anyway. Funny stuff you guys.

Isn't that weird how things can smell so differently to people? I can't imagine Lilies smelling like dog poop.

Funny you should bring this up, I bought a couple Cimicifuga racemosa from Bluestone in Spring of 07. They didn't bloom the first year, but I figured they'd bloom this year. So, then I read about this plant in William Cullina's book on Native Wildflowers and he writes - "Its one drawback is the odor of the blooms, which has the sour, musky smell I associate with overly territorial male cats but which probably serves to attract pollinating beetles." Sounds pretty bad right? Well they just started blooming and go figure I like the smell!!

I've got several cultivars of Salvia nemorosa, and can't stand the smell of the foliage, ugh, I hate weeding around the Salvia. But some people like it!

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the smell of lavender. Who doesn't? MY HUSBAND, that's who!! He says it smells like Raid!

Raid?! Too funny! Gee, I don't think I ever smelled my shastas. I will have to go take a sniff...

:)
Dee

You guys are so funny! Lilies are intense. My husband hates the smell and I'm allergic, so they all got yanked.
Never noticed the smell on the cimicifuga. Looking forward to sticking my nose in it this season!
Does anyone have giant fleeceflower? Now THAT is awful. I have it planted near a small tool shed. I thought for sure that there were several dead mice, or families of mice urinating in my shed! YIKES! I was actually happy when I figured out it was the fleeceflower. Smells ok coming into bloom, but going out...not so much!
Shasta daisies...Blech!

Boxwood can smell like cat pee sometimes, too.

It's amazing how much people's perceptions of "good" and "bad" scents differ. There's got to be a ton of cultural differences and hangovers from how we were raised, in addition to how we're wired genetically to perceive odors.

I like virtually all unusual, sweet and pungent scents associated with plants (including the fragrance of every variety of Salvia foliage I've sniffed). There's a 5-foot tall evening primrose (Oenothera species) blooming now in my yard, and the large yellow flowers have a hard-to-define fragrance which seems to include subtle hints of lemon, musk, and maybe some kind of household cleaner. I can see how others would wrinkle their noses at the fragrance, but I enjoy going out every night and trying to pin down just what it is.

Some years back we had a mild winter in southeast Texas, and my night-blooming jessamine grew and bloomed profusely, to the point where you could detect the powerful sweet fragrance over a hundred feet away. Some people detest that scent and claim it gives them a headache - to me it was like being magically tranported to nights in the tropics.

One unusual scent I've mentioned here before - the small yellow flowers of a tender tropical, Gynura bicolor, give off a mild but unmistakeable reek of used sweatsocks. Maybe not ideal for an indoor bouquet, but a cool bedding plant for the garden.

Great post! I love the smell of lantana, DH dispises it. He loves the scent of butterfly bushes, but it reminds me too much of a funeral home.

I bought three fragrant treasure daylilies after the smelling the blooms at a local garden center. It amazed me that they smelled just like honeysuckle. DH put his nose right in the bloom and proclaimed, "I don't smell a thing." He never has smelled those daylilies. I easily catch the scent. What gives there??

-Sharon

Earlier this summer the intense scent of Japanese Tree Lilacs filled my house on warm evenings. Personally I love it but several folks didn't care for the smell. On the rose forums there are a lot of threads about rose scent. Some people claim they can detect subtle hits of raspberry and licorice that make up a rose's fragrance???? Others smell 'old lady powder' (whatever that may be) in some roses. It makes you wonder if people's sense of hearing and taste are different too.

bean_counter, I know just what they mean when people say they "smell 'old lady powder' (whatever that may be) in some roses".

When I was a child, a lot of the skin/bath products had an antique-rose fragrance. Must've been the hot ticket for awhile, because it was everywhere. I particularly remember the scent of my grandmother's hand lotion being strongly reminiscent of roses. Closet and drawer sachets also had that fragrance, so it was easy to have rose scent throughout your house if you wanted/liked it.

Sometimes I wonder whether lavender, currently so popular for room sprays and scents, will be the "old-lady powder" for children now.

An interesting post, and I almost never post replies these days.

It is fascinating how different people can perceive scents so differently. I hate the smell of many roses as they smell very Âmedicinal to me, but many of the older garden roses especially I love the fragrance of. So some roses I like, but most I donÂt like the smell of.

My sense of smell is weak so I love strong fragrances, and I love lilies. But I also love the smell of tomato plants and most people think they stink. Lavender smells like soap to me, the fresh stuff at any rate but I like the dried fragrance. Because lavender is used in soaps and stuff so much, therefore I associate it with soap in my mind. There is nothing wrong with it, it is fine. But I still think "soap" whenever I smell it!

One year at Christmas a patient in our clinic gave us a huge bouquet of white Oriental lilies with garlands of pearls throughout--it was beautiful. We all fought to have a turn with it on our desks. After a couple of hours, we all fought to have it put on someone ELSE'S desks! We finally had to take it to the break room, and then move it out at lunch time so that we could all sit in the break room for meals. We made the doctor take it home with her.

Another year, someone gave me a gift of forced paperwhites. One morning I got up and went out into the living room where I had placed them, and almost passed out from the smell. I thought that I had had a mouse get in the house and die in a corner or something. I soon found out what it was and the paperwhites spent the rest of their natural lives on my front porch step greeting visitors. Beautiful flowers both of them, but awful smelling.

I couldn't agree more about about the nasty smell of salvia nemorosa. I was just outside cutting back my "May Night" and it was so stinky that I started to feel slightly ill. I came inside, googled "salvia and smell and hate" and found this thread!

I don't care for the smell of oriental lilies or paperwhites. Salvia nemorosa smells like gym shoes to me and that's why I don't grow it anymore. I like the looks of it, but I dreaded going near it, so it got the old heave-ho.

OTOH, I love the smell of tomatoes and marigolds. I also love lilies-of-the-valley, peonies, gardenia (but not a huge bouquet indoors - it gets too strong), wild roses, lilacs, daphne odora, and most other flowers.

I found that too many oriental lilies growing and blooming together can be too much to take.

And I have to agree about the smell of May Night Salvia. I just finished dead-heading my plant and it's smell reminds me of "lingering tom cat!" Definitely not pleasant to do, but the dead-heading keeps this plant blooming until frost, which I love.

Linda

I was about to post about May Night Salvia as well. I bought some when it first came out after seeing it advertised in a magazine. Part of the description was "fragrant flowers." I could hardly wait! Then it started to bloom and Peeee-UUUUU!! It smelled like a tomcat!
One of my favorite flowers is Heliotrope. I've heard it described as cherry pie, vanilla, or sugar cookies, but I think it smells like baby powder. I also love the smell of petunias in the evening. I didn't know thistles had a fragrance till I decided to take a sniff of some I was pulling. They smell quite nice!

The scent of Oriental Lilies is one of my favorites in the whole wide world. I would have made my husband tough it out! And he'd have never been doing the dishes for me. :)