Stopping to Smell the Peony Picture

My white peonies are in full bloom. I don’t know why only my white peonies are in bloom and not my pink peonies. The pink peonies are still tightly balled fetuses of a flower waiting to reveal themselves. Perhaps they are shy or maybe the 10 minutes more shade they get a day does make all the difference.

Either way, the white peonies are wide open and my nose is in heaven. I love the smell of peonies. I could sit with my nose buried in a peony flower all day (as long as the ants have all left. It is hard to smell anything with an ant up your nose).

Long ago (more than 2 years), before The Fall (the dot-com bubble burst), many companies were formed with grand ideas (crazy schemes) about how to improve (make money off) our internet viewing experience. One of those ideas was DigiScent. It was this machine that you would plug into your computer and then you could smell what you see on a webpage.

DigiScent failed for a great many reasons, mostly due to poor marketing and the fact that their idea was just pretty stupid. I mean really, do you need to smell everything you see? As you can see here, I just laid down some fresh manure in my garden. See what I mean. Bad idea.

But if, for some unfathomable reason, DigiScent had succeeded, I think gardening blogs would be very different.

Gardening is an experience that requires all five senses to really appreciate it. On our blogs, we can only share one sense with our readers. Two if we are really working at it and have the knowledge to make a podcast or midi. You can’t fully understand gardening unless you see, hear, feel, smell and taste a garden. It is one of the few hobbies I can think of where you need total sensory immersion to enjoy it completely.

I wish I could share with you the smell of the white peonies in my garden. I wish that we lived in a world where even dumb ideas were given a real chance. Who knows, maybe some venture capitalist will resurrect DigiScent and we gardeners can use it to share even more of our garden. Except for the manure.