If so, hopefully it’s just the Callery Pear, “a deciduous tree that’s common throughout North America” which “blossoms in early spring and produces beautiful, five-petaled white flowers—that smell like semen”:
I said that Callerys are “common”: A preposterous understatement.
In Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, which is for horticulturists what the DSM is for psychotherapists, Michael Dirr says that the Bradford Pear—a Callery cultivar—inhabits “almost every city and town to some degree or another” and warns that “the tree has reached epidemic proportions.” There’s one between my apartment and my favorite coffee shop in Brooklyn, and there’s probably one between your apartment and your favorite coffee shop. The last time New York’s Parks Department conducted a tree census, from 2005 to 2006, there were 63,600 Callery Pears, making it the third-most popular species in the city, after the London Planetree and the Norway Maple. …
The way I see it, there’s weirdly little attention paid to the fact that, for a few weeks each year, there’s a good chance your street smells like semen. We just carry on as if that were normal.
Update from a reader:
My high school in the southeastern US was covered in bradford pear trees. The rumor was that the school administration had wanted to plant dogwoods all over the campus but found the price too steep, so they bought the pears instead (which do indeed look similar to a certain kind of dogwood.) In different versions of the story, the administrators either didn’t know what the trees smelled like when they bloomed, or did know and couldn’t care less. Either way, the smell was definitely not lost on us, though depending on the tree or time of year (I was never sure which) the smell kind of runs the gamut between semen and old fish. Regardless, it’s an unpleasant biological odor.
We of course did what any industrious high school students would do, gathering up grocery bags full of the fallen blossoms and then dumping them unexpectedly into idling buses at the end of the day, or shoving them through the slats of someone’s locker.
Another:
Thank you for clearing up what has been a two-decades-long puzzle for me, ever since my early teen years when I gained a reference point for the strange smell of those trees ;) My high school, or perhaps the neighborhood around it, must have been filled with Callery Pears, because every spring the whole campus would start smelling funny and yet nobody ever seemed to notice, or would pretend to have no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned that the air smelled like cum.
That was the weirdest thing to me – that everyone just ignored it even though I know they noticed it, and they pretended to have no idea what I was talking about. Right, as if a bunch of teenage boys don’t know what semen smells like. It all made me feel like I was in some kind of X-rated Twilight Zone episode … that, or I was crazy and/or perverted, which was the unfortunate reaction I got when I mentioned the phenomenon to a girl I liked. And trust me, she knew what I was talking about.
Anyways, I’ve been baffled by this annually for as long as I’ve been ejaculating, and I had chalked it up to either a strange hormone-induced brain trick or male gingko trees (which, I think, are the ones that smell like vomit). Thanks for finally putting my mind at ease.
(Photo by Flickr user slgckgc)
The Dish 