Lifestyle

Putting the scent back in gardens


WASHINGTON • One of the delights of the garden is to sit beside a sheltering hedge of the evergreen osmanthus, a holly lookalike that, late in the year, produces tiny white blossoms that fill the still air with a knockout perfume.

The hidden nature of the fragrance adds to the delight of savouring the garden one last time and it makes you yearn for ways to add more scent to the garden.

As an exercise in garden planning, assembling a bouquet of ornamental plants is harder than you might think.

A shrub or perennial must jump through a number of hoops before attempting the fragrance trick.

It must grow in your climate and your site conditions. It must have visual appeal, not just in its enduring blossoms, but also other traits such as growth habit and foliage appeal. These considerations have taken much of the scent out of the gardens.

There are other reasons gardens seem to have lost their fragrance. You look back at gardens full of rose bowers, wisterias, lilacs and mock orange and think earlier generations valued this sensory delight more than people now do.

Veteran author Ken Druse’s latest book, The Scentual Garden, is a reminder that the array of scented plants – tender and hardy – is bountiful.

“I’ve always been interested in fragrance,” he says, adding the first thing people do when they get close to a flower is to see whether it smells. Three-year-olds do it, so humans must be wired for sniffing flowers.

Certain fragrances – of lilacs, for example – will trigger distant childhood memories in a way other sensory cues cannot.

“It’s the same part of the brain where memories are stored, so there’s a biological connection,” he says.

Druse considered the science behind fragrance – it has to do with the release of molecules of volatile compounds and how people receive them – and came up with his own classification of floral smells, a dozen in all, including “medicinal”, “spice” and “forest”.

He finds many of the more pungent odours not only interesting, but also appealing. He is a fan of boxwood scent, paperwhite narcissi and oriental lilies; these have their detractors. Even the skunk cabbage, Druse says, has its allure. He calls its scent “animalic”.

Some of the historically important perfumed vines, such as Asian wisterias, Japanese honeysuckle and sweet autumn clematis, have fallen from grace because of their invasive qualities.

The same can be said of various species of the bulletproof shrub eleagnus, still in wide use in the 1990s.

The most fabled, scented shrub of all – the rose – has had fragrance beaten out of it by a century and a half of breeding for the sake of its flower.

Certain breeders – the late David Austin in England was an example – have toiled resolutely to put the scent back into the rose.

You can find scent in unexpected places. After admiring a daffodil or tulip, the next step is to smell it; some are piquantly fragrant.

Paperwhites belong to a class of narcissus named tazetta; fragrant garden varieties include avalanche, geranium and minnow.

Surprisingly, the pond garden can be scented, with pitcher plants and waterlilies, particularly tropical varieties.

The lotus blossom is heavy in scent, but you have to be close to catch it. The experience is one of those choice moments in the garden when the sight and scent of a blossom are matched superbly. The lotus fragrance is syrupy sweet and exotic, as befits the blossom.

The key to lotus-sniffing is to have a plant close enough to the edge of the pond that you do not fall in smelling it. If that were to happen, though, the price might be worth it.

WASHINGTON POST





READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.