Night-time flowers, Evening roses #2

Ho! you exclaim. Who is this person moving so swiftly through the tangled undergrowth of the New Zealand native bush, clad all in black, deterred neither by bush-lawyer nor by supplejack, led hither and thither by the erratic path of a bat on the end of a leash? Have no fear, ill-prepared tramper: he is merely a Riddled woodroser, gathering the stinking Dactylanthus taylorii flowers with which to brew this year's batch of Juggernaut Heavy. His chiropteran companion is a Short-tailed bat, which is why it sometimes flits and sometimes scrabbles across the leaf-litter, almost as nimble on the ground as in the air.

Another Kiwi boils the wort

The ancestral recipe for the Juggernaut calls for mistletoe, but that is tailored for European botanicals. We have adjusted the ingredient list to reflect local availability. Fusion cuisine blah blah locavory blah blah blah. And Dactylanthus -- the wood-rose or Hades flower -- is related to mistletoe, both belonging to order Santalales, though in the families Balanophoraceae and Santalaceae respectively. Also the wood-rose is a more extreme parasite than mistletoe, growing entirely underground except for the flowers. A traditional antipodean Christmas would not be the same without the ritual of "kissing above the wood-rose".

So the short-tailed bat -- which is the flowers' natural pollinator -- is there to sniff them out. The scent is sometimes described as "musky", sometimes as "Squalene plus an entire Owsley-laboratory's worth of organic congenors". The Wikipedia entry compares it to "mammalian sweat". But do not be alarmed gentle traveller that your perspiration will attract a mob of pheromone-maddened bats a-licking at your armpits and a-driving you off cliffs, for (1) the comparison is not made by any of the source documents; and (2) bats have no reason to evolve an attraction to sweat, for bats do not sweat. As any fule kno.

Left: Wood-roses

Right: Snow flowers

What's that? We should try using Dactylanthus nectar in a perfume, by analogy with other noxious scents like ambergris and musk? Well we are way ahead of you there, and you will find our 'Woolshed' and 'Milking Shed' perfumes among the merchandise in the Riddled gift-shop (turn left on the way out). Though if you insist on looking like a cheapskate, feel free to shell out on cheaper products like the amusingly-shaped keyring.

Research on basing a perfume on Rafflesia nectar continues, undeterred by the complaints from the neighbours and the visits from the police.