Perfume Plant

The Perfume Plant is a bit of a misnomer. Though I can tell you it was definitely named by Tenganaw. It's actually quite beautiful. It's a type of shrub with these three-inch red and orange flowers. When you've got a bunch of them, all blooming at once, they look almost like they're on fire. Unfortunately, it smells terrible.
Actually, to say it smells terrible is a bit misleading, since the flowers only smell terrible when they first bloom. Then, with each day, they smell sweeter and sweeter, until, just before the flowers wither and die, you'd think you're smelling the sweetest thing you've ever smelled. Actually, that smell gets even better when the whole plant is dying, but I don't think the scent is worth killing the bush.
What I've learned from Renee Agustin is that scent is actually how the flowers communicate--not with each other, mind you, but with the animals around them. See, animals like deer tend to find the flowers incredibly tasty, but if they get eaten before they can pollinate, they can't reproduce. So early on, they give off a very pungent odor, like rotting fish, to deter any animals that may want to eat them. Fortunately, they still attract some insects, like flies, that help pollinate them. As the flowers get older, they start to prioritize pollination over self-preservation, and the smell grows sweeter, to attract more insects, until it puts out one final burst of scent before the flower dies. Renee tells me this is also why the plants smell even stronger when they're dying--they try to attract as many animals as they can to help them reproduce. Of course the Tenganaw grow it all over their communities.
Okay, that's not entirely fair. The Tenganaw have used the dead-fish scent to deter other people coming to their communities the same way the flower deters animals. And most of them have gotten used to the smell by now. But even if they use the plants for this, they tend to grow near rivers and lakes anyway, which is where the Tenganaw also live, so you could say the two are symbiotic. In fact, the Tenganaw have found several uses for the perfume plant in their magical workings. Various parts of it are often used in healing poultices, but some Tenganaw have even been able to distill that sweet scent--the good one--into an actual perfume. Well, for that matter, they've distilled the bad scent too, which they sell--very diluted--to gardeners to keep animals away from other crops.
The most fascinating aspect of all of this, however, is that the Tenganaw have bred them to scent in different ways. Now, if I was breeding a plant to change its scent, I would have gotten rid of that awful smell. But the Tenganaw, if anything bred it to last longer. Like I said, they use the plants to hide their communities. But more importantly, the scent of the plants will change based on how much water they have and what type of nutrients they're getting. Renee tells me any smelly plant will do this, but the Perfume Plant is much more noticeable. As in, I notice it. And I don't notice it in other plants. Basically, this is a type of olfactory message to tell the people who tend them how happy they are and what kind of nutrition they're needing in their diet. So an experienced Tenganaw gardener knows from the smell of the plant exactly what care it needs. Bet you wish your pet could do that.