 Walking around my garden today, a mid-November day, in Cornwall, England I thought about the many flooded gardens elsewhere in the country and was grateful to live on a hilltop. We often suffer from gale force winds but never floods. However the whole garden is suffering from waterlogging and there is very little work that can go on. Because of that I can sit down and keep up my garden records without a troubled conscience telling me to get to work tidying up the borders.
Wandering around this morning I was especially surprised how many scented plants were still making a real contribution. The long flowering orchard grass has just been given its final trim before winter so that the early bulbs can make their appearance after Christmas. Therefore the whole garden smells of mown grass - really a scent of summer. This "scentsation" sent me on a search for other added scents and the ones I particularly noticed were mainly on evergreen shrubs. In the little sheltered white garden outside our guest bedroom the Mexican Orange Blossom, Choiysa ternata, that gives me such a cascade of white flowers each spring, is now covered with a scattering of deliciously scented blossom. Next to it a newly planted Japanese camellia sasanqua has just one open white flower with a central boss of yellow stamens. The autumn flowering sasanqua camellias, unlike so many of their spring flowering cousins, carry a delicate, spicy tea scent and around the corner I have a much larger specimen called Rainbow that is now in full flower like enormous, scented pink and white apple blossom. At this time of the year it sits in a pot on my terrace and I can breath in its sweet fragrance several times each day.
Elsewhere in the more woody parts of the garden a number of Elaeagnus x ebbingii are hiding their small whitish flowers under their leaves but their scent gives them away and parting the branches I search them out. We first planted the shrubs to give us a salt resisted windbreak and their autumn flowers are a real bonus. Nearby there is a Mahonia japonica, one of several scattered around. Soon it will be opening its long spires of lemon coloured flowers. I like to use their lily-of-the-valley scent in small Christmas posies for the table among the evergreen leaves.
One of the many climbing plants fighting for space on the long pergola is my favourite honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica 'Halliana'. It carries its orange-blossom scented white,cream and yellow flowers in pairs and is almost evergreen. It has been flowering profusely all the summer and shows no sign of slowing up. Today the inner part of the pergola is a scented green cave. Closing my eyes I could forget the onset of winter and believe myself back in the summer garden again.
A garden without scent is unthinkable for most of us, Yet too often we choose plants on colour or size and only later realise the red rose we bought has as overwhelming rich scent while the pink multiflowered rose - so pretty -and chosen at the same time has no scent at all. If the pink rose was chosen for an inaccessible spot and the red rose was a climber for the arch around the side door it may not matter at all. However if we bought the roses in the winter and didn't read the labels too intently we might end up the other way round. Perhaps the unscented pink rose was planted on a raised bank behind our garden seat where we would like to lean back and enjoy a sweet scent and the richly scented red Climbing Eva Harkness was placed on a remote arch beyond our reach or nose!
I don't have very many scentless plants in my garden although there are certainly some that earn their place by other means. Bright early spring flowers on a camellia are treasured although most of them will be unscented. Yet as I write I am aware that so many "unscented" flowers carry some air of sweetness or spiciness with them. Sometimes the leaves make this contribution, other times it may be the mix of fresh raindrops with clean petals that gives a sense of faint perfume although the plant label makes no such claim. Smell is so personal that I shall never know whether the scent I capture from my white lilac tree is exactly the same as the person standing next to me. It is even possible that my companion may dislike white lilacs all together and classify its scent as overpowering and unpleasant.
Invited home to meet my future mother-in-law I took a bunch of what I thought sweet smelling narcissus. It was February and at that time anything more exotic was beyond my pocket. However I thought the scent of the creamy flowers most attractive. Only as we drove down the country lane towards my future husband's home did he comment that the flowers looked pretty but it was a pity about the smell! I gave them to his mother all the same and never found out whether his sense of smell was inherited or not!
Keen gardener and designer of sensory gardens for people with disabilities. Lives in Cornwall, England in a very small village on the Atlantic coast. Lived on a west-country farm all my life but trained and worked in psychological counseling but now retired from that and enjoying my gardening and garden designing. http://www.marhamchurch.demon.co.uk/index.htm
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