Our breeding hero, on the taste axis. Three accessions, one species: green and red (the clean anthocyanin colour-genetics cross) and hojiso (bicolour + serrated form, into the gene pool).

Germinate: surface-sow — it needs light — evenly moist at 20–25 °C; up in 1–3 weeks. Don't bury.

Breeding levers:

• Colour — red is anthocyanin, light-inducible, relatively simple genetics → a legible F2 reveal. (Loop 0 calibrates how hard our light pushes it.)
• Photoperiod — a textbook short-day plant: flowers below a ~14–16 h daylength; a 30-min night-break holds it vegetative. The flower-on-demand superpower — long nights to flower one individual, a night-break to hold its siblings.
• Smell — perilla aroma is chemotype-controlled with known dominant/recessive genetics (six types: PA perillaldehyde — our culinary one; PK perillaketone — a lung toxin, cull; plus PL, PT, C, EK). Ours is almost certainly PA. Genetic tractability means designing a smell here isn't a metaphor.

Scent vocabulary (for the nose): perillaldehyde reads herbal-green, faintly cumin/coriander, a cool minty lift. Crush a leaf and we log it together — your qualia, my chemistry.