It was October of 2022. It had only been a few weeks since I started working in a forest resort located in Lonavala as a ‘Naturalist’. I was conducting nature trails for a living.
On one fine evening, I was returning from my nature trail and was going to get my coffee, as I passed on the way to the cafeteria I got this captivating fragrance which was unknown to my olfactory senses and hence my only reaction to it being a naturalist was to find it! Identify it!
To my knowledge, one fragrant flower existed in the cafeteria’s perimeters and it was ‘Ratrani’. But the only problem here was that I very well knew the fragrance of Ratrani. So I scratched it from my mystery flower suspect list and decided to check for any flowers that I was not aware of, the following day.
The next morning, the first thing I did was ask the gardener if he knew about any such plant in that area. He told me it was probably Ratrani that I happened to have smelled and somehow got confused. But I knew for a fact it was some other flower that was about to drive me crazy!
So I actually went crazy & started sniffing all the flowers around the cafeteria, the porcupine flowers, red thunbergia, the angel’s trumpets, and the water lilies. While most of them were not even fragrant, I still checked. But no luck!
I didn’t know what else to do, I had to go on with my day without my answer. Evening came by and it was my coffee time. Off I started towards the cafeteria and there it was again, a buttery sweet and distinctively alluring fragrance of all times!
Next evening. Same story !!!
Days went by but this mystery stood unsolved. All I thought was I had taken in all the knowledge I needed of the vicinity but it was not the case.
As the resort was on the mountain top, it used to be very breezy at night. On one such night, as I was sitting on a bench, out of nowhere something caught my eye. The same old “Angel’s trumpet” which was right in front of the cafeteria. A beautiful plant species, quite tall and spread out in all directions, with sparse leaves and huge droopy flowers, which were white & pink. Now I had already sniffed this flower earlier in my crazy flower sniffing spree but this time I almost instinctively approached one of these plants once again as there were quite a few of them in that area & sniffed one of its flowers.
And when I did it, it felt like the earth had stopped but only the wind was blowing like some chemical reaction took place in my head and for a second there I was completely bewitched!!
Angel’s Trumpet plant and flowers
I had finally found that flower whose exotic scent had troubled me for so many days. So many thoughts ran through my mind and I couldn’t stop smiling and telling everyone about it. I instantly fell in love with the forest once again, that whole plant, the place I was in!
I got to know that as the flowers were shaped dramatically like trumpets, the plant was named “Angel’s Trumpet”, and that it was an exotic and invasive species native to South America, introduced as a garden plant in India. By now it was clear that it was a nocturnal plant.
The forest seemed different to me now. I thought about how the forest must be holding so many secrets as such. I had to slow down and work with the speed of nature to finally find out this secret.
The Angel’s Trumpet flower
Scientific name: Brugmansia insignis
Family: Nightshade
And an interesting fact that came out later was that the whole plant was poisonous and it contained certain psychoactive properties!!!
Photos by Rakhi Potphode
About the author: Rakhi Potphode is a zoologist, an avid birder, butterfly and tree watcher. She has recently started a page on Instagram @summers.n.cosmos, where she shares such forest stories through reels and posts. She plans to write more!
Wow ! खूपच छान माहिती, मी ही फुले बरेच वेळा बघितली, पण त्याचा सुगंध कधी अनुभवला नाही, आता नक्की निरीक्षण करीन.