frangipani

The word frangipani derives from the name of the Frangipani family, a Roman patrician clan whose name in turn comes from Italian frangere il pane — 'to break the bread' — a reference to a medieval legend that a Frangipani ancestor distributed bread to the poor during a famine. In the sixteenth century, the Marquis Muzio Frangipani created a perfume — or perhaps more accurately, a scent for perfuming gloves, a fashionable practice in Renaissance Europe — that was described as a complex, sweet, waxy floral fragrance. When French and Spanish explorers and missionaries began sending specimens of the tropical flowering tree Plumeria back to Europe from the Caribbean and Central America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the flowers were found to have a fragrance strikingly similar to the Frangipani perfume. The plant received the nobleman's name by association with a scent, not by the botanist's usual procedures of description and naming.

The genus Plumeria (the correct scientific name) was renamed for Charles Plumier, the French Franciscan friar and botanist who documented Caribbean plants in the 1690s and 1700s — the same Plumier who later named the magnolia for Pierre Magnol. Plumeria is native to the tropical Americas: Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. But the genus has been transported and cultivated throughout tropical Asia, the Pacific, and East Africa so extensively and for so long that it is now inseparable from the sacred and mortuary landscapes of those regions. In Thailand, Bali, India, and Hawaii, Plumeria flowers are used in temple offerings, garlands, wedding ceremonies, and funeral rites. The tree is planted in the courtyards of Buddhist and Hindu temples, and in many Southeast Asian traditions it is associated with protection of the spirit and with the transition between the living and the dead.

The chemistry of Plumeria's fragrance is a minor triumph of secondary metabolite biochemistry. The scent is produced by a complex mixture of volatile compounds — including phenylacetaldehyde, benzyl alcohol, methyl benzoate, geraniol, citronellol, and farnesol — in proportions that vary by species and even by individual plant, giving different Plumeria species their distinctive variations on the general floral-sweet-creamy theme. The same compounds appear in many of the most valued perfumery materials, which is why the scent is recognizable as belonging to a specific olfactory family associated with luxury. The Marquis Frangipani's perfume, created before the plant was known in Europe, evidently captured something real about the floral chemistry of natural aromatic compounds; the plant, when it arrived, confirmed the synthesis.

In Hawaii, the lei — the garland of flowers draped around the neck as a greeting — is most commonly made from Plumeria, and the image of Plumeria flowers is one of the most reproduced symbols of Hawaiian cultural identity in global tourism. This use is historically recent: Plumeria is not native to Hawaii and was not part of pre-contact Hawaiian culture; it was introduced to the islands in 1860. The lei tradition predates Plumeria's arrival and was originally made with native Hawaiian flowers. The displacement of native lei materials by Plumeria in the twentieth century — driven by Plumeria's prolific blooming, ease of stringing, and prolonged scent — is a small, gentle example of a general pattern: introduced species becoming cultural emblems in their adopted landscapes, while the native species that held that role become invisible.