On a recent Friday evening, I hovered among a small group of guests in a tiny storefront gallery in Bushwick. Each of us was there in anticipation of a rare chance to smell a phantom flower. When the pendant on a necklace I’d been given at the door began to glow, an attendant dressed in white led me behind a folding screen to a corner where the artist Miriam Simun waited. In silence, she fitted me with a plastic device that hooked over my ears and rested on my nose like a pair of glasses. A scent pod with a changeable wick was attached to the device by a wire, which curved down like a mutant insect antenna so that the pod hovered more or less directly beneath my nostrils.
The flower whose scent I was now equipped to smell was the Agalinis acuta, or sandplain gerardia: a very small, very pink flower that is the only federally protected endangered plant species in New York State. Simun—who last year captured and shared the scents of deep-fried Atlantic cod, chocolate milk, and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in order to simulate the experience of consuming foods that are threatened by the extinction of their ingredients—came across the acuta_ _when she was asked to create a New York-specific olfactory experience for the “NYC Makers” exhibition, at the Museum of Arts and Design.
The acuta flower is_ on the verge of extinction, but the fact that it exists in the first place turns out to be a legal fiction based on a taxonomic error, “which only made her more perfect,” Simun told me. The acuta, which was thought to be one of about seventy species of the genus Agalinis, was listed as endangered in 1987. In 2010, however, two University of Maryland scientists discovered that the acuta is genetically identical to another Agalinis species, the decemloba._ The decemloba, which is found in patches of the American South, was named first, so, according to taxonomic rules, all acuta flowers are actually decemloba.
Still, the acuta_ _is the species protected by federal law—a status that requires expensive surveys, public hearings, and mountains of paperwork to attain. And so, Simun explains, “all the botanists I talked to continue to refer to her as acuta. Everybody does. They’re aware of this finding and they acknowledge that it’s right, but they just say, ‘Well, this is what gives us the tools to protect the flower.’ “
The plight of the acuta is not well known, even among the conservation community. This is perhaps due to the diminutive size of the flower’s blossoms (“I could fit two or three flowers right on the tip of my index finger,” Simun said) and to the fact that it blooms for only a few hours, just after dawn, on one day every year. Because of this fragility and ephemerality—as well as the flower’s intense pinkness—Simun considers the acuta the epitome of floweriness.
Simun worked on this project for months, visiting sites and talking with conservationists and botanists, before seeing the Agalinis acuta bloom. Then, early one morning in late August, she paid a visit to a small patch of land in Montauk that was donated to the Nature Conservancy by Andy Warhol. There she saw “this entire field of pink. There’s this description from the eighteen-hundreds, which the ecologists use as a historical baseline, saying that Montauk was a sea of pink, that they saw millions of flowers. This wasn’t that, but you could get a sense.”
There was just one problem with this exquisite flower. Its scent was imperceptible to humans. “I would try to smell her, and the blossoms would just go up my nose because they’re so tiny,” Simun said.
There was a hint, however, that the flower had a scent to equal the beauty of its appearance, even if it was too faint for humans to appreciate in the wild. Maile Neel, one of the botanists whose genetic analyses revealed that acuta was a taxonomic error, told Simun that she had never seen so many bumblebees gather around a flower as did around this one. Simun suspected that this might be poetic license inspired by the researcher’s fondness for her subject, but, at six in the morning in Montauk, she witnessed the bumblebee flashmob for herself. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she told me. “There are just hundreds of bumblebees, and they look drunk. It’s only for an hour, and then they all fly away.”
To capture the olfactory chemicals floating in the air around the tiny blossoms, Simun borrowed the technology that one of the largest scent and flavoring companies in the world, International Flavors & Fragrances, uses to harvest scents. Its apparatus, developed in the nineteen-eighties and patented as “IFF Living Flower Technology,” consists of a high-tech glass bowl that captures and concentrates volatile chemicals in a small tube full of sticky powder when placed over a living plant. Back in the lab, the powder can be analyzed to provide a list of the chemicals that make up a particular smell, and their relative proportions, enabling perfumers to re-create the scent from scratch.
At the end of August, Simun accompanied an I.F.F. team out to an Agalinis acuta site just an hour away from Brooklyn (Hempstead Plains, coincidentally the field from which Charles Lindbergh took off for the world’s first non-stop flight across the Atlantic). The perfumer’s trained nose could pick up a faint scent in the glass bowls, and declared acuta’s smell to be “quite sophisticated,” Simun said. It contained musk, green, and floral elements, as well as a sweet, almost tropical note at the end.
Working with the perfumer, Simun split the scent into two elements—a fragrance, to be delivered to the nostrils using her smell headset, and a flavor, to be consumed as a cocktail. Together, she hoped, the two would mingle in a participant’s olfactory system to create a fleeting perception of Agalinis_ _acuta’s scent as never before experienced by humans.
Receiving the olfactory experience in two forms—the scented cartridge and the cocktail—had a couple of interesting effects. As I swished the drink around in my mouth while wearing the headset, bursts of flavor combined with short inhales of the scent to make the experience even more ephemeral than I had anticipated. It was there for a tiny, magical second, and then it was gone before I could really appreciate it—not unlike the flower it came from. In combination with the attendant in white, the process of tasting the beverage created a sense of ritual—a moment of intense communion filled with wonder, loss, and longing.
“It’s a tiny pink thing, and, as a species, it’s not an ecological linchpin or anything,” Simun said. And yet, she explained, the flower manages to embody the complex blend of heroic effort, emotional investment, and sense of futility that characterizes human relationships with endangered species. Simun told me that the land managers who work in the acuta’s remaining habitats go to extraordinary lengths to monitor and maintain the population: burning the land; weeding out invasive species; gathering and sowing the flower’s tiny, hard-to-germinate seeds. All the while, they argue passionately among themselves about the correct way to preserve a small pink flower that most people have never heard of.
As I sipped the dregs of my cocktail, trying to experience the scent one last time, the woman next to me seemed entirely overwhelmed by the experience. She was part of the team responsible for preserving the Hempstead Plains acuta habitat, Simun later explained. She could hardly comprehend that a room full of strangers was having the chance to experience and care about—for the first time, and perhaps for the last—the flower she has spent so much of her life trying to save.
