What If the Secret to Memorable Museum Visits Is Right Under Your Nose?

If you’ve ever walked into a museum and felt… underwhelmed, you’re not alone. Blame it on the walls. Or more precisely, what’s not on them. Because while our galleries may be overflowing with objects to see and sometimes to hear, there’s one powerful sense we almost always leave at the door: smell.

And that’s a missed opportunity—one that a museum curator and a scent researcher are determined to fix.

Let’s rewind to a botanical garden in St. Louis Missouri, where Nezka Pfeifer curates exhibitions that bridge science, art, and culture at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum. Like many curators, she’s constantly hunting for ways to deepen public engagement. But unlike most, she found inspiration not in a new app or digital touchpoint—but in a nose.

Enter Sofia Collette Ehrich – also known as the Olfactory Contractor – an olfactory museologist, whose research explores how scent can enhance storytelling, education, and immersive experience within the cultural sector. After seeing her speak at a previous MuseumNext conference, Pfeifer reached out. Their shared interest in sensory programming led to a collaboration on a public programming initiative: Uncovering the Fragrant in the Sachs Museum Mural. This programming is just one part of a new exhibition called Smelling the Bouquet: Plants and Scents in the Garden, which is designed to explore the intersection of plants, scent, and memory.

What scent can add to an object story

Smells can evoke personal associations and memories. For museum interpretation, that offers a way to connect a material, plant or object with experiences visitors bring with them.

Ehrich describes scent as a potential aid to storytelling and emotional engagement. This project does not report a comparative study of visitor recall or comprehension, so its value here lies in the activity design and the connections it invites visitors to explore.

Museums like the Prado in Madrid and the Met in New York City have already dabbled in scent-based interpretation. But Smelling the Bouquet took a different route—because it started with the plants themselves.

A booklet that leads visitors into the garden

The Missouri Botanical Garden isn’t just home to beautiful flowers. It also houses a rich community of scientists researching everything from pollination chemistry to endangered species. With two existing scent-forward gardens and researchers using “headspace trapping” to analyze plant aromas, Pfeifer saw an opportunity to root the exhibition in deep botanical knowledge.

The result? An interdisciplinary feat involving local perfumers, international scent artists, researchers, and designers. Together, they crafted a visitor experience that invited guests not just to look—but to sniff.

For Uncovering the Fragrant in the Sachs Museum Mural, the team created a fold-out booklet featuring five plants: roses, magnolias, water lilies, hops and grapes. All appear both in the gardens and in the museum’s ceiling mural. The booklet brought together a mural image, plant descriptions, questions and a scratch-and-sniff sticker.

Why the mural? It’s massive, beautiful, and entirely overhead—making it hard to engage with directly. The printed guide linked descriptions with specific plants depicted above, then connected to a GIS map of the gardens so people could continue the journey outdoors.

A scent activity should give visitors control over how they take part. For a mural-based trail like this one, the printed image, plant descriptions and questions can carry the story even when someone chooses not to smell the sample. Work with the scent specialist and the museum’s access and collections teams on how the material is presented, where it is used and how visitors can avoid it. That planning belongs alongside the creative brief. multi-sensory interpretation at the Van Abbemuseum offers another example of providing different sensory routes into a collection story.

What curators, scientists and perfumers each brought

Here’s something museum professionals often forget: you don’t have to do this alone. Pfeifer and Ehrich’s partnership spanned years, continents, and disciplines. And that’s precisely why it worked.

Curators brought curatorial insight. Scientists brought plant knowledge. Perfumers brought the craft of scent creation. And Ehrich—part researcher, part interpreter—helped glue it all together.

For both collaborators, the process revealed something deeper. Pfeifer reflected on how museum objects, often displayed behind glass, can become distanced from their original sensory richness. Scent, she argued, helps bring those objects back to life. Ehrich, meanwhile, saw firsthand how open-minded institutions can elevate emerging fields like olfactory museology.

Planning an optional scent experience

Begin with an object story that scent can help visitors explore, then involve specialists early. Agree how exposure will be managed, consider health and access needs, and review the materials with collections-care staff.

planning for sensory differences is part of that preparation. A visitor who avoids the scent should still be able to follow the mural, read about the plants and continue into the garden.

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Sofia Collette Ehrich and Nezka Pfeifer spoke at the Museums & Public Programs Summit, May 2025.