Recent Public Assignment Submissions
Over the course of the last year we have been inviting residents who use Folkeparken (NO), Chopwell Wood (UK), and the Palatinate and other smaller woods in Germany’s Rein-Neckar Region to send us images, writings, sounds, videos and other material that represents their experience in the woods. Here are some recent submissions we have received.
The Scent of Soil - Submitted by Oisin (UK)
The 21st March 2020 was the equinox and meant to be such a positive day as the official first day of Spring. However, it ended up being one of my darkest days, as I heard in the morning that the best man at my wedding (and vice versa) had died at home after a long illness and I went down with my first symptoms of Covid 19 later that evening.
Roll on seven weeks and I was slowly recovering from the virus and trying to restore my strength and fitness. After a whole month indoors, I was starting to go for short, slow walks and enjoying brief exposure to the local woods. On one warm and quite humid afternoon in early May, I was strolling through the oak woodland and stopped for a while to enjoy a very familiar smell.
The rich, organic and earthy smell had been triggered by some spots of rain that day. I already knew that it was caused by a special type of filamentous bacteria (actinobacteria) in the soil, in much the same way as the smell of sea that we all love is also caused by a mixture of chemicals from the activities of bacteria, algae and other organisms on the sea shore.
When I checked the internet to learn more about this smell, I was delighted to find that it has its own word – ‘petrichor’. This etymological journey of discovery was an adventure in itself. The word was created by two Australian scientists in the 1960s, who named the smell from two Greek words – petra (stone) and ichor (the fluid that flows through the veins of Greek gods). The main chemical is geosmin, which is released from the soil in small aerosol droplets with the onset of rain under certain conditions and can be detected by the human nose in concentrations as low as 5 parts per trillion! This is possibly due to the evolutionary importance to our ancestors in needing rainy weather for survival.
The whole experience of smelling the petrichor and discovering more about it, was a most welcome escape from the bleakness of the previous weeks and one that I will remember for a long time.
Only yesterday, I heard the soundtrack of the award-winning film Nomadland, which had a track called ‘Petrichor’, so this word will probably become well known to many of us quite soon and will be a welcome reminder of the beauty of hidden nature around us.
