The project aims to offer insights into olfactory heritage (smells that hold significance for communities because of their association with specific places, objects or traditions), paying particular attention to how ‘bad’ odours can inform museum practices and impact visitor experiences. 

The project is led by artist Dr Siôn Parkinson and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of a pilot scheme, co-ordinated by the V&A, to support eight Early Career Research Fellowships in Cultural and Heritage Institutions.  

Background 

The blooming of the corpse lily Amorphophallus titanum in 2015 recorded the highest ever audience figures (54,000) to the RBGE Glasshouses with visitors queuing up to sniff the stench of ‘rotten meat’, ‘garbage’ and ‘sweaty socks’ emanating from the plant’s gigantic inflorescence. The lily, Scotland’s first titan arum, was nicknamed ‘New Reekie’ in homage to its new home in Edinburgh, a city still affectionately known by its stinking soubriquet, ‘Auld Reekie’, because of the choking chimney smoke that once filled the air of the Old Town around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  

Museum and gallery initiatives have tended to shy away from ‘bad’ odours, focusing instead on pleasant smells from the past. The enormous public interest in the flowering of the corpse lily at the Botanics shows the potential value of olfactory objects in cultural and heritage institutions, even, if not especially, unpleasant ones.  

 It is in this context that this research takes place, refocusing its attention from foul-smelling flowers to malodorous mushrooms: the dune stinkhorn Phallus hadriani.

The dune stinkhorn is significant in the history of mycology and botanical illustration due to its being the subject of the first printed book dedicated to a single species of mushroom, The Description of the Phallus (published in 1564). The stinkhorn’s powerful odour has been described as smelling of ‘carrion’, ‘rotten fish’, ‘semen,’ ‘and the devil himself’, a scent the mushroom uses to attract flesh- and dung-eating flies and other insects to help disperse its spores.  

Project outputs 

One of the outcomes of the project will be the design of a portable olfactory toolkit that recreates the odour of a ripe dune stinkhorn. This smell kit will be used to train staff and visitors to the Botanics to better identify the scent of the mushroom in its natural habitat in coastal parts of lowland Scotland. To do this, Siôn is collaborating with Dr Cecilia Bembibre, a leading specialist in the chemical odour analysis of historical smells at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage. 

Siôn will be working other mushroom-related olfactory objects at the RBGE Herbarium and Library, including the copy of English botanical artist James Sowerby’s beautifully illustrated volumes, Coloured figures of English fungi or mushrooms (1797–1803).

Viewed in the context of RBGE’s collection of over 2,500 mycological artworks, the project asks: “What do visual representations of fungal odours (including inadvertent representations, such as stains, smudges, mold, and so on) in historical botanical illustrations and printed books reveal about the ways in which mushrooms appeared to the artist who drew them, as well as to future audiences and amateur naturalists?” 

Project Partners 

University College London, The Institute for Sustainable Heritage 

The KB, the National Library of the Netherlands