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Comment by flutas | Hacker News Reader

They also smell like someone took a rotting fish, dunked it in sewage and decided to roast it in the sun for a few days.

They're everywhere where I live, and it's so bad.

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These are the same trees known as Cum Trees, right?

My neighbors have a couple, I didn't know these before moving to the US, and the first time I smelled them was... something.

I thought that was the Linden tree.[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m-8l3V38Ps

Always the first thing that come to mind when smelly trees "come up"

Linden trees have a unique scent, but I never thought it was repulsive or even remotely associated with the kinds of things people associate it with.

What people eat, affects how they smell and their.. um, liquids.

I suppose this is where the whole "you are what you eat" and similar BS sayings came from.

That reminds me of when I asked an arborist why the tree they were taking down was called a “Piss Oak”. They said wait until we drop it and you won’t have to ask. Sure enough the entire area smelled like urine for a couple hrs after they felled the tree.

Do you mean Piss Elm? I've never heard of an oak with that quality.

I believe the polite common name is “Pin Oak” [1] a fast growing, short lived, and relatively red oak. Supposedly the smell comes from a bacterial infection that afflicts most of the Pin Oak population.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quercus_palustris

That's wild. I have cut hundreds of pin oaks and have never encountered that. I learned something!

I've never been very fond of nature to begin with[0], but I never imagined becoming disgusted by trees. That's until seeing some four different tree species mentioned in this thread, whose common characteristic seems to be the aura of shite and decay that takes years or decades to break through people's desperate need to pretend that since it is nature and handles well, it must be good.

[0] - Specifically at human/humane, live in and breathe in and admire it scale. I'm very fond of nature at population scale, and at molecular scale, both of which present interesting puzzles and applications.

> I've never been very fond of nature to begin with

> [0] - Specifically at human/humane, live in and breathe in and admire it scale. I'm very fond of nature at population scale, and at molecular scale, both of which present interesting puzzles and applications.

I can relate to this a lot. I feel the same way about nature as I do about a tiger or a volcano; I think they're cool and I respect them, but I don't care to spend time up close with them.

At risk of being pedantic, tigers and volcanoes are nature.

I don't see why it's inconsistent for me to feel similarly about a small part of something as I do about the whole, or why it might not be rhetorically useful to help explain something by drawing a comparison between them

There's a reason people tend to burn down rain forests.

Well, two reasons: money from the cleared land, and rain forests tend to be unpleasant reserves of biodiversity with all sorts of nasty plants and flying insects that want to lay eggs under your skin.

Honestly, it's the money from the cleared land. Horrors of nature are the reason people stay away. People move in only when those horrors occupy resources people think can be put to a better use.

Yes, it's often enough dumb, short-sighted, self-destructive selfish behavior, which I absolutely do not condone. However, horror or disgust alone are nowhere near enough to get people to engage in such behavior. At most it gets people to try - and sometimes succeed - to clear invasive species out of the gardens they already have.

Yep, the ambush of Cocoa tree is terrible.

At least one street here got lined with those. A witty lesbian friend I was walking with identified the scent immediately, so at least the trees were good for some jokes.

I don't think wit is how she identified it.

They sure are

Piperidine Trees, if you spent too much time in an undergrad chem lab.

We had one in front of our house at one point, and the first year it bloomed we thought there was a dead animal under the house.

Some people say they smell like bleach and/or semen as well. I'd rather have Durian than Bradford pear.

Common Pear trees have also this fish smell. Everything pollinated by flies has an offensive smell in one or other way. This is bad but can be desirable at the same time (no wasps or bees in the narrow streets).

The other one that smells horrible are female gingko trees. The fruits smell like rancid butter or garbage.

These days you can really only buy the male ones but older plantings are awful. https://www.purdue.edu/fnr/extension/ginkgo-stinkgo-are-boys...

We have a street lined with those. To me it smells like vomit.

I have one in my yard and it doesn't smell at all. It also doesn't produce fruit.

My high school had a bunch of these. All the kids called them CumDrop trees, for good reason.

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