My nose, the portal: On scent memory and isolation gardening
“Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity. ”
As a South Asian woman the smell of jasmine is a trip for me. Catching the aroma from a vine full of white blossoms in my North Oakland neighborhood immediately transports me to the outdoor markets of Mumbai where you can buy strands of jasmine buds, known as mogra or chameli ka gajra, to put in your hair.
I remember an early childhood trip to India where my grandmother bought me a gajra from a street vendor as our taxi sat at a stoplight. She quickly made the transaction with a few rupee coins and put it in my ponytail. The scent filled the Hindustan Ambassador and I was blissfully intoxicated. I wore those flowers until they were brown and tattered. From the moment my grandmother put that jasmine in my hair I've been on an endless olfactory journey – gathering vivid memories one nose-full at a time.
(Side note: Most of the jasmine found in the US is not Asiatic jasmine. It’s actually called Confederate Jasmine or star jasmine. It doesn’t smell the same and the name bums me out. My Dad’s plant, at my childhood home in Texas, actually gave me a headache. The ones I pass on my walks in California do not. So usually before I get transported to my childhood in Mumbai with my grandmother, I have all these other thoughts first. Smell is a complicated thing.)
My new sage clippings and my furry life partner.
Speaking of the Confederacy, from 2007 to 2009 I lived in Atlanta, Georgia. In design school, I made a visual smell-mapping project of my Midtown Atlanta neighborhood inspired by Diane Ackerman’s, A Natural History of the Senses. (I highly recommend it. Ackerman has a fascinating, semi-scientific way of looking at the world through smell.)
Ackerman explains that in the early days of humanity – when we were creatures of the sea – smell was our first sense. We used it to hunt and decipher if a potential bit of food would be poisonous. So a small lump of olfactory tissue on top of the nerve cord eventually developed into a brain. Ackerman says “Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from the olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.”
When you stop and smell the roses, eat food, have sex, or have any other emotional experience, your nose becomes a portal to the past and the pathway to creating long term memories. I’m psychologically transported to my first experience of jasmine with my grandmother almost daily. When I smell the Asiatic jasmine oil that I use on my skin, the odor molecules are absorbed by millions of cells in the mucous of my naval cavity called cilia. The wiggly, waving cells shoot information to my brain’s olfactory bulb immediately triggering nostalgic memories and creating new ones. Before I have time to mentally edit or process my feelings, I’ve added to them and logged them in my long term memory.
“Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from the olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.”
I’ve found that when I’m feeling down, a smell can help me brighten my mood or release the emotional baggage or stress that I’m carrying. I put on my jasmine oil, light a sandalwood incense stick or smudge my house with sage.
On one of my recent COVID walks, a term I’m borrowing from Barnali Ghosh, cofounder of the Berkeley South Asian Radical Walking Tour, I was smacked by the overwhelming scent of sage coming from around a corner. A neighbor had just done some trimming and set clippings out on the sidewalk. I was so delighted by the smell that I plucked two stalks from the bucket, cut my walk short, and ran home to put them in water. Meanwhile, I’ve been building a small vegetable and aromatics garden full of potential time travel triggers. I’m growing lavender, rosemary, and basil in addition to veggies and tomatoes. (And if you saw our IG stories on Tuesday, we’ve been growing some other transcendental greens for months ... but that’s a separate story.)
It me replanting tomato seedlings so each one has more room to grow roots. Instead of buying seed starting trays, I finally found a use for these mini plastic cups that my mother-in-law gave me five years ago. I poked holes in the bottom of the cups with a bookmaking awl.
My tomato bb’s in a plastic tray. If they make it, I’ll have some starter plants to share!
Sowing seeds, the routine of watering and watching things sprout, has never been so satisfying for me. Maybe it helps keep track of the passing of time marked by seeds, seedlings, then young adults. It definitely grounds me to the natural world, which gets lost in the bustle of the modern hustle. This pandemic has made so glaringly clear to all of us that we are all connected to and dependent on this earth. But mostly, it has me dreaming of the day when I can go out to my garden and grab a fistful of rosemary for baked chicken and potatoes and stick my face in a lavender bush before running inside.
The scents of lavender and rosemary both remind me of my early days in the Bay Area, walking the streets of San Francisco. I’d never actually seen nor noticed these plants in the places I lived before. Growing up in Southeast Texas, they were just dry spices on a grocery store rack. In Atlanta, I didn’t have the time to think about anything but design. But when I moved to California, I found gardens overflowing with the stuff.
At the time, I was inspired by Alice Waters and the slow food movement. I was a vegetarian in protest of GMOs, Monsanto, and factory farming. California cuisine seemed to be an answer, and growing a garden seemed like one of the most radical things you could do. I started craving fresh herbs, on walks, in food, in cocktails. The abundance of these herbs made it a guiltless crime to swipe sprigs from neighborhood bushes, if just for the emotional rush.
It was a more hopeful and exhilarating time then, when possibilities seemed endless. That time still exists somewhere inside, along with the memory of fresh jasmine in my hair, and I intend to sniff it out, somewhere in my garden.