Real Detectives Stop And Smell Behind The Flowers

Barley, a dog, ignores two white flowers as she sniffs within a patch of ferns.

I don’t doubt that Barley can smell the nectar in the flowers she passes, but I’ll be darned if she’s ever given a single hoot about them. For all her olfactory orientation, her relationship with smells remains strictly instrumental, and the beauty we humans discern in a flower is entirely lost on her. Instead, she is a connoisseur of occult aromas, of secret bouquets of another sort that our human languages will never even begin to have the words to describe.