Heaven's scent

[Charlie]

Heaven Scent does not set seeds, but does make useful pollen. I haven't done a whole lot with it recently because I am concentrating more on singles but I plan to do some more with it one of these days.

Fragrance in hibiscus is very elusive and what some call fragrant is rather iffy. To me fragrant means a truly perfume-like smell, not just a slight smell of flower petals. As an example, you can smell candle wax but would never mistake the smell of the wax for a truly scented candle that has scent added to the wax. I have smelled perfume scents in only a handful of hibiscus - Pink Poodle, Elephant Ear, Heaven Scent, and a sub-species of H. arnottianus. In these the scent is present only occasionally and it may be necessary to put your nose to 100 blooms of each of these before you hit on one that is truly scented. When you find one of these that is scented it is very definitely perfumed and there is no doubt about it. Also I've seen that the sense of smell is widely varied in people. Young people seem to have more of it than older people, but individuals of any age can be very different in their ability to detect scents.

Charlie

[helixturnhelix]

I am curious as to what conditions cause fragrance to be produced.  (Since even the ancestor, H. Arnottianus, doesn't always have fragrance)  At anyrate, it is an interesting trait to look at, and I would really like to see what offspring HS can make