Winter scents

Fragrant flowers can help lift the spirits on cold winter days. Monty shares his favourite plants to fill the garden with olfactory joy

Try describing any scent and you may cast around for words but always end up comparing it with another odour in the hope that your listener will recognise it. It is like a conversation in a foreign language of which you have only the scantest knowledge. But the presence of scent, agreeable or otherwise, can be as carefully chosen for your winter garden as for the rest of the year.

Spring in the air

The choice of plants is more limited, but their quality is not. Some of the best fragrant shrubs are winter flowering and powerfully scented to entice the few pollinating insects around at that time of year. Many snowdrops have a delicate but delicious fragrance, especially when picked and brought indoors. The common snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis, is not especially scented but 'S.Arnott' is worth growing for its exceptional fragrance, not to mention being a good, vigorous flowerer, too.

I grow Iris reticulata in pots and raise them under cover so that the weather doesn't spoil their intense purple flowers. Their scent can fill the greenhouse on a sunny February day and they are great to bring indoors to a windowsill when in flower, and they last a surprisingly long time. Crocuses also have fragrance but catching it is tricky unless, like snowdrops, they are brought closer to the nose than the average planting allows. C. chrysanthus is perhaps the most fragrant. I have yellow cultivars at Longmeadow, while 'Snow Bunting' is also good.

Honeyed delight

For all the wintry weather they have to cope with, there is a sense that crocuses belong to spring, or at least winter behaving like spring. But some winterflowering shrubs really do choose the winter as their preferred flowering season rather than taking a march on spring, and some of them have superb fragrance.