Exploring the fragrant inspirations of the season
Peterborough Examiner – October 10, 2025 – by Drew Monkman
Leaving the house one wet morning this week, I noticed our maples had shed many more of their leaves overnight. Despite feeling daunted by the raking ahead, I couldn’t help but stop and breathe deeply. The air was rich with that spicy, earthy fragrance of damp maple leaves — like stepping into the heart of a forest.
Appreciating nature isn’t just about sights and sounds. Smell — along with touch and taste — also shapes our connection to the world. I can smell the seasons changing, and those scents are inextricably linked to specific emotions and memories.
Yet most of us rarely notice what our nose is telling us. Sight and hearing dominate our experience, and our culture often treats odours as impolite or unmentionable. Still, smell connects us instantly to place and memory; without it, we would feel isolated.
The science of scent
The smelling process itself is remarkable. Inside our nasal cavity are five to six million, microscopic olfactory cells that, in turn, can detect millions of odours. Each cell is tuned to a particular molecule, much like a lock fits a key. When triggered, these cells send signals to the brain’s smell centre. Dogs, by comparison, have 50 times more of these receptors, which helps explain their astonishing scent abilities — and reminds us of the pleasures we humans miss. Dogs also have a much larger portion of their brain dedicated to analyzing smells (about 40 times larger than a human’s) as well as a physical nasal structure that allows them to separate the functions of breathing and smelling, leading to a much higher sensitivity to odors.
Smell is our most ancient sense, wired deep into the brain’s emotional and memory centres. That’s why even a trace of an odour — one part per billion — can stir vivid recollections. The faint whiff of outboard motor exhaust, for instance, brings back memories of fishing trips with my grandfather. For others, it may evoke nothing but fumes and noise. Our responses to scent are intensely personal.
We lack the words
Part of our inability to talk precisely about smell stems from language. We simply don’t have the vocabulary for it. Apart from the seven basic smell groups — minty, floral, ethereal, musky, resinous, foul, and acrid — we’re left grasping for comparisons: “like vanilla,” “like wet dog,” “like fresh pine.” As author Diane Ackerman wrote in “A Natural History of the Senses”, “Lacking vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasure.” Contrast that with sight, for which we have endless words for colours and shades.
The art of smelling
Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century naturalist, turned smelling into an art. Walking through the woods, he crushed or rubbed nearly every plant he passed, releasing the volatile oils plants use to defend themselves. A crushed prickly ash leaf, for instance, floods the air with citrus — a clue to its membership in the orange family. Thoreau even loved the swamp’s “decaying vegetation,” writing that he enjoyed its rich, earthy odour as much as pine or wildflowers. I can’t walk by a balsam poplar in the fall or winter without stopping to press a bud between my fingers. I love its sweet, resinous, almost medicinal smell that instantly evokes a damp spring morning.
Among Indigenous peoples of the Amazon, smell remains a vital means of identifying trees. With leaves or flowers often out of reach, they simply nick the bark and inhale the unique blend of resins and oils that wafts out.
Anyone who takes the time can follow the progression of the seasons by scent. Paying attention to these shifting aromas deepens our awareness and anchors us more firmly to the Earth’s endless rhythms. Although I wrote on this topic a year ago, I’d like to take a deeper dive into the variety of smells the fall season has to offer.
Aromas of early fall
- Freshly fallen leaves – The spicy, earthy scent of fallen leaves is one reason autumn feels so nostalgic. It’s the smell of change itself — of endings and quiet beginnings.
- Burning leaves – Few smells are more deeply tied to memory. The smoke instantly takes me back to my childhood, raking piles of leaves with my grandfather and watching and smelling them burn in the cool fall air.
- Sun-warmed pine needles – On bright fall afternoons, few scents are more comforting than that of dry pine needles heated by the sun. It’s a warm, resinous perfume that seems to hold the very essence of soft, slanted autumn light and its long shadows.
- Harvest aromas – Apples, squash, and other late-season produce at farmers’ markets fill the air with the comforting smells of abundance and gratitude.
- Wood smoke – The first wood fire of fall carries a hint of melancholy. That familiar, resinous aroma marks the closing of summer’s door and the promise of long evenings by the fire.
- Fermenting fruit – The faint spice of wild grapes fermenting along a fence line or over-ripe apples on the ground are two time-honoured smells of fall.
- Fungi – While most mushrooms lack a strong odour, some stand out. Agaricus mushrooms smell faintly of almonds, while freshly-emerged shaggy manes (Coprinus comatus) give off a faintly earthy, pleasant scent. At the opposite end of the scale, stinkhorn fungi live up to their name, releasing a carrion-like smell that draws flies instead of admiration.
Late fall fragrances
- Decomposing leaves – In late fall, the forest floor becomes a living compost pile, the air rich with the damp, pungent scent of countless billions of bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates reducing leaves to soil. Some call it “the sweet, heavy breath of the forest floor”.
- Fresh-cut wood – November is the season for cutting firewood, and few scents are as satisfying as a saw or axe biting through a log. White pine smells sweet, resinous and faintly citrusy; white and yellow birch have a light, wintergreen scent that recalls the smell of Tinker Toys; and red oak emits a strong, tannic, almost wine-like scent that evokes a feeling of age and permanence.
- Manure – Less romantic but equally seasonal, the pungent smell of manure drifts from farm fields as it’s spread before the ground freezes — a reminder that even decay feeds renewal.
- Wintergreen leaves – On autumn and even winter walks, I like to crush a wintergreen leaf between my fingers and breathe in its sharp, refreshing scent. The leaves of this evergreen wildflower can even be chewed — nature’s original breath mint.
Take time to cultivate your awareness of fall’s many fragrances. The season speaks through scent as much as colour. By noticing where these aromas come from and what they reveal, every walk through the woods or afternoon raking the yard becomes richer—a quiet reminder that autumn is as much to be breathed in as it is to be seen.
