Muskflower

The Muskflower is a very special flower among the collection grown in House Attar - it has a powerful musky scent that is used as the base of many of their most popular perfumes. The plant is very hard to come by - found only in a land thousands of miles to the northwest of Kinilan. House Attar has a whole greenhouse dedicated to the growth of this plant, as its diminutive size means each plant can only produce a very small amount of the valuable musk extract used in perfume, though even with that limitation, it is still far cheaper than importing increasingly rare animals that generate the scent.

Basic Information

Anatomy

The muskflower is a small perennial, growing up to a foot long stem adorned with 2 inch long flowers and topped with a tubular yellow flower no larger than 1 inch long and an eighth of an inch in diameter. The flowers are hand pollinated by House Attar's best gardeners in order to promote the production of the desired scent.

Ecology and Habitats

The muskflower grows in moist, cool conditions and requires a degree of shade. House Attar's greenhouses have magically controlled climates to control the temperature. In the case of the muskflower greenhouse, it is actually necessary to cool the room significantly to protect the delicate flowers from the heat of southern Kinilan, where the Attar estate can be found.

Conservation Status

While the wild muskflower is alive and well, wild specimens, as well as many of those cultivated by perfumers elsewhere, have lost the distinctive scent that makes them valuable, to the confusion of all concerned. Theories abound as to the cause - some odd kind of magical shift in the nature of the plant, a change in the climate, a theory that it was an insect that lived within the flowers that created the scent, even that something has changed about people such that they can no longer smell it. But all of these are falsifiable by one simple fact: House Attar maintains a population of muskflowers with their original intense scent, using it for the majority of their products.