The sweet scent of winter

For a week or two every winter, my basement is filled with a strong scent that is difficult for me to categorize and even harder to avoid. It's a sweet, flowery perfume that is almost too strong for me to bear.

It starts in the early evening, is gone by morning, and always takes me a few days to remember what "that smell" is when I walk into the room.

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It's one of my Sanservieria, the small one I got from my friend Mike a few years back. I haven't really done much with it -- it's still in its too-small pot -- but if I water it and give it a taste of fertilizer at the right time, it rewards me with blooms in the middle of winter.

Actually, "reward" may be the wrong word, as I don't know if I really like the scent at all. It's so strong, this is sort of how I feel when I get close:

The unopened blooms have a pinkish-purple tint to them, which is quite nice:

A few of the blooms split open each night...

...and it is shocking how much scent this tiny thing can release.

To give you a sense of scale, each of the unopened blooms is about 3/4" (19mm) long.

It looks like I have another week or so of blooms left, then this scent is gone for another year...

...which is probably a good thing, because even though Sansevieria are pretty good at removing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the air, when in flower they're producing lots of them too.

Speaking of winter blooms, I just remembered that I never got my Amaryllis bulbs out of the garage!

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