ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The most diverse collection of wildflowers at any national park is now in bloom in the Great Smoky Mountains. Jacqui Sieber with WUOT in Knoxville, Tennessee, stopped to smell those flowers.
IAN SABO: Smell that right there. Just give it a little whiff.
JACQUI SIEBER, BYLINE: (Sniffs) Oh.
SABO: That little smell...
SIEBER: Yeah.
SABO: ...You know, it kind of got a...
SIEBER: Whoa.
On a cool, drizzly morning in a wooded area just outside Gatlinburg, park botanist Ian Sabo is on a hill festooned with colorful wildflowers and blooming shrubs. He bends down to examine a three-petaled white flower with a very pink center. It's about a foot off the ground. By its smell, he identifies it as a sweet white trillium.
SABO: It's got just these really wide, broad, overlapping petals. I think that really kind of gives that one away.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING)
SIEBER: This little trillium is one of over 1,500 types of flowering plants that are found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
SABO: We have, you know, plants here in the park that don't grow anywhere else in the world. So it's pretty neat, you know?
SIEBER: Like the rhododendron smokianum. The park's spring wildflowers are at their peak right now. Sabo says they attract certain pollinators with their smell, like the red trillium, better known as stinking Willie.
SABO: I had some folks say it's kind of reminiscent of wet dog, but it's not a very appealing smell. And so that trillium's actually more pollinated by, like, carrion flies.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER FLOWING)
SIEBER: Sabo spots a yellow trillium near a creek. He pulls out his phone, takes a picture and enters it into the iNaturalist app. It's used by millions of people around the world. With one picture, the app pulls up suggestions of what it might be.
SABO: And it's like, hey, it's a trillium. It's trillium luteum - is visually similar, expected nearby.
SIEBER: This app helps the park keep track of its flowers. Todd Witcher is with a local nonprofit that helps catalog the park's wildlife.
TODD WITCHER: We try to encourage people to look for some very specific things we're wanting to know more about. We basically mine the data from iNaturalist to add to our inventory.
SIEBER: He says over the past three years, they've added 200 new wildlife discoveries using the app. Sabo says he welcomes people's input. Just be sure you take time to smell the flowers, like the lemony scent of this yellow trillium that's similar to Pledge furniture polish.
(Sniffing) Yeah. That's...
SABO: Yeah, we just don't want anyone...
SIEBER: ...Scented Pledge.
SABO: ...Picking the flowers, right?
SIEBER: Yeah.
SABO: But smelling the flowers is fine.
SIEBER: For NPR News, I'm Jacqui Sieber in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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