Take time to smell the climbers
Plant fragrant climbers now for knockout scent all season, writes
THERE is a tendency to think about gardening as an entirely visual art form: a pursuit that is all about playing with the colours, forms and textures of the natural world. However, to me the most dramatic impact that being around plants has on my mood usually comes not via my eyes, but from my nose. Instantly triggering emotions and memories more than any other, our sense of smell is somehow often overlooked when it comes to talking about gardens — and even more so when designing them.
The number of times I have seen plants with the most incredible fragrance growing right at the bottom of the garden where we tend to spend the least amount of time — as opposed to around seating areas, patios and by entrances to the house, where people linger far longer to take it all in — is unbelievable. You don’t have to have acres of space or ninjalevel horticultural skills to surround yourself with botanical fragrance, either. With perennial, scented climbers almost anyone can get years of gorgeous aroma in the tiniest amounts of plot space for the 10 minutes it takes to plant one.
Here are three of my very favourites that can still be planted right now for knockout fragrance all season long.
In sheltered spots,
Jasminum polyanthum starts the spring with a bang, smothering itself in hundreds of white, starshaped flowers that have bright pink throats. After an initial burst of blooms that are often pungent enough to fragrance a whole city street, they carry on giving dribs and drabs of flowers right up until the first frost. OK, it may not be quite as reliably hardy as the more common Jasminum officinale, but it more than makes up for its lack of tolerance to polar blasts with pure flower power in our climate.
Later in the summer comes
Trachelospermum jasminoides,
a neat evergreen climber that loves being trained against walls and over arches.
The jasminelike flowers start out white and fade to cream, with glossy, dark green foliage that blushes bronze and red in the colder months. Despite being similar to jasmine in appearance and name, it has a very different fragrance — rich, sweet and vanillalike.
It was once thought possible to grow Trachelospermum
jasminoides only in a glasshouse, but it is proving far hardier than we gave it credit for.
Picking up the baton from midsummer comes Clematis rehderiana. Unlike the more familiar, massive, scentless ‘‘showgirl’’ types, this oftenoverlooked beauty produces delicate, greenishyellow clusters of small bellshaped blooms with the most upliftingly refreshing orange blossom fragrance.
The best thing about
Clematis rehderiana is that it churns these flowers out right up until the first really hard frosts. It is a vigorous grower that is properly hardy, but it will need a good prune each spring in order to control its size if you are growing it on a smaller plot. —
❛
You don’t have to have acres of space or ninjalevel horticultural
skills to surround yourself with botanical
fragrance