The smell of rain Posted on July 18, 2011

John Grimshaw (John Grimshaw’s Garden Diary) John Grimshaw’s Garden Diary) has responded to my coinage of Pluviophily as a word for the love of rain with one for the scent of it: ‘petrichor’.

Petrichor combines the greek for stone and the blood of the gods. Two Australians coined it in 1964 in the journal Nature, explaining that the smell derives from oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, then absorbed into clay particles. Rain releases it into the air along with another compound, geosmin. These are what we smell – or at least what Australians do.

We have different plants and different soils. Having looked up geosmin (literally ‘earth smell’). I am more inclined to think it is its associated microbes that give me so much pleasure.
Although the long-range forecast suggests the novelty will soon wear off.

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Trad’s Diary started as the editorial column of the RHS Journal when it was remodelled and relaunched as The Garden in 1975. I was responsible for the changes, wrote the column then, and still do when I have an idea, 45 years later. I am Hugh Johnson, author of Trees, The Principles of Gardening, and lots of stuff about wine.

Trad borrows his name from John Tradescant, gardener to Lord Cecil at Hatfield and to King James I, one of the first to introduce plants from abroad to England. His family name, having become extinct, seemed a fitting label for a column of garden jottings. It was adopted in 1977 by the new Trust for the Garden Museum in Lambeth, where John Tradescant (the accent is on the second syllable) lived and is buried. Today the museum is in full and exciting expansion mode. I urge you to visit its website, visit it personally, and support it as much as you can.

Trad took to the ether as a blog in 2008. There have been two anthologies, in 1993 and 2009, and since 2008 the text has been published quarterly in Hortus magazine. Scroll back, if you have time to waste, over hundreds of earlier entries. Better, use the Search button to look up things that might interest you. This index facility is priceless to the diarist; now he can see how often he repeats himself. Thanks to Simon Appleby and Bookswarm for making this happen.

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