I've always been puzzled by claims like "plant A smells just like whatzit." Other than the one that smells like cat urine to me (maybe English Charm?), I've never found such claims to be meaningful. There was an interesting little piece that's relevant to all of this in the January 1950 issue of the AIS bulletin, in which the author, A. W. MacKenzie, writes about a study in which 58 people "were asked to smell flowers of Bombeya natalensis and report" what they smelled like. "Clover strawberries, almond, heliotrope, coconut candy, honeysuckle, turnips, wild cherry, May flowers and stale orange rind together, lemon and apple blossoms, are some of the descriptions given by those who called the odor pleasant. Rotten coconut, lemon-lime, rotten eggs, sweaty socks, soured milk, wilted cucumber, pyridine, floor wax and 'something rotten' are among those given as unpleasant." You say Kool-Aid; I say tomato.
