100 Flowers : #003 Sweet Box

It's interesting that so many winter flowering shrubs have highly scented flowers . . .

#003 : Sacococca hookeriana var. digyna

Sweet Box 

It would be easy to walk past this small rather uninteresting bush, were it not for the perfume that fills the space around it. The scent is hard to describe, it's sweet, heavy and can be overpowering if you bring a sprig or two indoors.

However outside in the garden the scent drifts around and dilutes, so you're not quite sure where it came from . . . did someone walk past wearing an expensive Parisian perfume?

The scent comes from these male flowers – clusters of stamens with tiny petals the size of pin heads at the base.

The female flowers are so tiny and insignificant it's hard to spot them . . .

 

Can you see the tiny green bulb-shaped embryo berries with two curved white stigmas emerging from the top – those are the female flowers. And it's the berries rather than the flowers that the botanical name describes . . .

Sarococca : sarkos means 'flesh' and kokkos means 'a berry'

hookeriana : is in honour of the botanist and director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Hooker (either Sir William Jackson Hooker or his son Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, no one seems to know which!)

digyna : di means 'two' and gyna means woman, refers to the female part or berry having two seeds.

I'm not sure I've ever seen berries on our Sweet Box. I wonder what pollinates the flowers?

Celia

xx