Sweetness and Perfume
Since the beginning of my gardening journey I wished for a fragrance garden, so I planted the well known scented flowers like sweet peas, lilies, and carnations. The garden surprises you, though, because that heavenly scent, that fragrance that fills the air and seems to originate nowhere doesn’t usually come from these plants.
Have you ever wondered around your flower patch trying to trace a delightful fragrance and had trouble finding its source? Some of the perfume masters come as a surprise, others are quite obvious.
First off, in spring the sweet breeze is heavy with the fragrance of tree blossoms, the cherry, plum and apple flowers that smell like citrus and honey. Later on the magnolias work their magic, it took me some time to figure those ones out. Some flowers only smell from a distance but not up close, which makes it even more difficult to pinpoint the source.
Mid-spring the scent of candytuft lingers, to let you know it’s there, even if you can’t see it, and Viburnum makes you drop whatever seemed to be a priority at the time to find the source of its intoxicating fragrance.
Roses usually perform, but not the ones you would think. All summer my garden is filled with a delicate but steady aroma of apple, citrus and cloves that I managed to trace the back to the “Gourmet Popcorn” landscaping roses, an unfussy miniature china that blooms from June till November.
The heat of summer afternoons brings out the herbs’ aromatic oils and infuse the slow moving air with the scents of mint, lavender, basil, anise hyssop, and bee balm. Most of the sweet fragrance of the summer and fall though comes not from flowers, but from ripening fruit, even fruit we don’t consume like crabapples, Japanese quinces, or honeysuckle berries. The clover blossoms permeate wild meadows with their honey scentto attract butterflies and bees.
The old fashioned perfume of violets melts my heart and I would love it if it accompanied the delicate image at the beginning of this article, but as you know not all violets are fragrant and alas, mine are not.
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