HEAVEN SCENT

As summer adds a new dimension to his garden, Nigel Slater reflects on the rewards of planting for perfume

-  PAUL WEARING

June, and the garden is at its most sensuous, inviting – no, imploring me – to look, touch and sniff. It is a wonderful month for smelling the garden. I do this first thing in the morning and again in the evening when everything is at its olfactory best. 

Perfume was one of the first considerations when I started this little garden. The lavender bushes, I planted along the path to run my fingers through as I walked past, didn’t last long in my London clay, but the high hedges planted to trap the scent of wallflowers and the vanilla notes of sweet box (Sarcococca hookeriana) have worked as I had hoped. Wallflowers are the smell of my childhood; as sweet as the tin of Parma Violets my grandmother kept in her handbag, perfuming her lace handkerchief and purse. Their scent is an essential part of this space.

The perfume that plants so generously give to this garden starts in March, when I catch the first fleeting scent of Viburnum x bodnantense. I know her and her sugar-pink pompoms simply as ‘Dawn’. The soft, clove notes always take me by surprise, a reminder that even though the stems are bare, spring will soon be here. It is as if the garden is whispering: “Don’t worry, it won’t be long.”