Of course, the Smell Fan helped cool visitors strolling through the show at FDR Park, but its primary purpose as a botanical fragrance field guide helped Flower Show visitors of all ages to explore and describe their smell experience. With illustrations by Shands organized around 10 botanical categories drawn from "The Scentual Garden" by Ken Druse, the fragrance wheel included popular crowd-sourced smell descriptions that Rowan and Monell collected last year.

The 10 smell cues on the fan include many people's favorite and familiar: rosy, citrus, fruity, sweet—and some startling but spot-on adjectives: rotten, musty, yeasty, fishy, metallic.

Kitson, who also teaches in the department of Geography, Planning & Sustainability, explained, "The fan is a conversation piece, an opening for talking about smell experience—memory, emotion and place—plus smell loss due to Covid-19 and the ways the sense of smell is critical to human health and well-being."

Sweigart, who with Kitson wrote a grant proposal to help support the Smell Fan, saw the project delight Flower Show visitors and help them discover science and their own sense of smell in a new way.

"Monell is trying to bring more awareness to smell science. It was a pleasure to partner with their team and illustrate with visuals and language how we experience smell," she said. "By encouraging people to take just an extra moment to think about their sense of smell, we provided a new way for children and adults to have fun and learn about themselves and their world."

For more about the project, visit the Rowan University SMELL FAN website.

For more about the science of smell, visit monell.org.

For more about research and multidisciplinary projects at Rowan University, visit rowan.edu.