Garden Centre

Monday, June 4, 2007

The scents of early summer

This is the best time of year for people like me – every season has its glories of course, but the late spring/early summer period has the greatest glory of all, to my way of thinking, because it has the most beautifully fragrant flowers.

In my garden, right now, with the faintest hint of sun, the scent of the broad bean flowers (light, sweet, milky), competes with that of the pea flowers (clear and clean smelling), but both are totally over-ruled by the perfume of the dianthus flowers. The deep purple ones in the picture are the alpine dianthus Annette which has the distinct aroma of cloves which is the signature note of the dianthus (or pink) family. They are planted with the taller dianthus Flamingo which has a lighter and less rich note, something like raspberry ripple ice-cream. They are in a container because my garden soil doesn’t favour dianthus and I do! So I pot them up and add some sand and a tiny amount of gardeners’ lime to the compost to give them the conditions they like, free-draining and lightly limed. Dianthus only give of their best when the sun hits them – if you water them in the morning, it can take several hours for them to shrug off the moisture and produce their wonderful aromas, so I am careful always to water mine at dusk, so that I get the whole day with their powerful, almost edible, scents filling the garden. They really like to be in stone containers for reasons that I don’t understand but try to respond to, so I either give them clay or something like this, to put their roots into.

On the balcony, outside my bedroom window, are:

The sweet peas; a mixture of the purple and crimson variety that have the best scent (intense, sugary, somewhat wine-like) and the multi-coloured pastel varieties that are prettier to look at but less fragrant (fleeting scent with a somewhat papery afternote) – they give the room a sweet fragrance all day and

White night-scented stock or nicotiana, which hardly have any odour at all in the day, but suddenly flood the night air with an aroma that is like vanilla and golden syrup, an intensely sweet and pure odour that guarantees good dreams …

Fragrance in the garden is one of the greatest pleasures I know, and given the choice between a scented and unscented plant, I'll always choose the former. It's like a feast for the nose at this time of year and I hope your garden is as full of fragrance as mine ...

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:04 AM

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