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The best plants for sensational evening scents
Now that it is past midsummer, with the promise of balmy nights to come, we’re being treated to sumptuous smells. By Isabel Bannerman
Getting to the allotment at the end of a summer’s day, it is not just the green bounty and the birdsong which is uplifting but, subliminally, our mood is altered by the smell of green things, edible, arboreal, and floral, as we spend the gloaming watering, grooming and gathering-in.
I spend winter nights trying to remember the special qualities of smell and light of these summer evenings. Now that it is past Midsummer and into high holiday season, the very bricks and mortar are warmed through like storage heaters. Even the garden under rain has begun to smell musty but comfortable.
The briar rose leaf still broadcasts cidery fumes, moss rose flowers are gone but their sticky sepals still emit an aromatic smell of books and white spirit. Fig trees are without parallel, the smell of the whole plant radiates its own sun and earthiness. Our sensations are in holiday trim and ready to notice scented plants.
EARLY SCENTS
Spring this year came thankfully bright but the lengthening days were still chill and arid; when the sun went down, we were driven indoors. One of the earliest evening smells of the year comes from the flowers of honesty (Hesperis matronalis), although this year it was too cold for early moths to get busy, drawn by the scent, and do much pollinating. But as April dissolved into May the pulse of the garden quickened.
There were opportunities for a sundowner and, one evening at sunset, we watched moths emerge in a friend’s garden, all of us enchanted by the mango scent of the honeysuckle-coloured flowers of deciduous azaleas (Rhododendron luteum and R. occidentale, both need acid soil).
Warm, moist, and fairly still are the optimum conditions for smell to evanesce, and in the landscape these conditions may be found more readily in woodland and protected valleys, from the Himalayas to Cornwall. In the permanent twilight of woodland, white smelly flowers, even imported rhododendrons such as ‘Loderi King George’, thrive and balloon with scent, along with our native lily of the valley and honeysuckle.
They all have a distinct advantage of using volatiles, smell molecules which travel on air currents but which would be quickly dispersed in bright light or breeze, to attract day and night-flying butterflies and moths, as well as flies and bees.
MID TO HIGH SUMMER SCENTS In June, the evenings stretch out, cool and dewy. The scent of roses and philadelphus fills warmer evenings, and the muscat grape smell of elderflowers hangs over hedge and yard. But the longest day always comes too suddenly.
If there is a hot or stormy spell the nights are calmed by scented geraniums and jasmine, both smells that shield against low feelings. The jasmine’s creamy, suave and persistent perfume is reputedly an aphrodisiac and undoubtedly uplifting.
Once days are long enough the night flowers come into their own. I like to imagine myself a moth ambling among the stocks and tobaccos, lured by the almost terrible trumpeting of lilies in the dark and the waving wigwams of sweet peas.
Midsummer brings sweet peas in abundance and towers of lime blossom on huge trees in parks and pavements. These are smells that induce a feeling so strongly benign that one might not realise the source. Karen Blixen describes this in the morning: “The lime trees were in flower. But in the early morning only a faint scent drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.”
The fruitiness of limes goes well in a planting or a bunch with mock oranges (Philadelphus) or when muddled up with sweet peas. Christopher Lloyd thought Cupani’s sweetpeas, or the Matucana types had a “scent… of a voluptuous richness, such as one had forgotten a sweet pea could possess”. So plush is this smell it could almost be the subtropical gardenia with which it shares a bewitching earthy, truffled undertone.
I have sat for long mesmeric periods in early July watching hoverflies grazing on the anthers of sugared Lilium regale, all of us drugged by the scent.
Lily perfume is the greatest night incense, even in the virginal madonna lilies and the native martagon lilies, though their smell is cooler, closer to
melon rind than their Asiatic cousins.
“It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad,” wrote DH Lawrence and he was right, lily scent is molecularly heavy, it sinks in the garden rather than floating. The dusky ‘Pink Perfection’ and resounding amber ‘African Queen’ flower in succession in July, later than the straight L. regale, and with a hotter, more gingery smell.
A much lighter scent, which will drift upwards into your open bedroom window in high summer, is that of nightscented stocks; the whiff is violets, white chocolate maybe, reminding me of ballet shoes. These hardy annual stocks (Matthiola longipetala subsp. bicornis), originate from wild sandy places in the Mediterranean fringes of the Middle East, where their life is brief, and they need to get pollinated quickly by the similarly short-lived moths of the night. For this reason, they put all their efforts into making a far-reaching, night-emitted perfume, and are next-to-nothing plants to look at.
Tobaccos scent the night with exotic warmth, familiar yet incredible. The smell of Nicotiana affinis and N. suaveolens are closely related to those other night emanators, the angel’s trumpets, once Datura, now called Brugmansia. Both smell powdery and powerfully narcotic; brugmansias work well in pots as does the larger, longer flowering N. sylvestris, glimmering in the dark and liking a bit of shade as its woodland epithet suggests. N. × sanderae is similar and has a hybrid called ‘Fragrant Cloud’, which is very tall but strong-stemmed and fruity smelling, sweaty with guavas.
I find that in the evening air the smell becomes more diluted and decorous. The plants are easy to grow; statuesque and beautiful; bold enough to add to borders, beds, and pots with no need for staking.
IN LATE SUMMER Brugmansias flower when crickets sing, and an August moon picks out their pagoda bells, pearly against the dark. Most are fragrant in the evenings to attract pollinating moths, but Brugmansia suaveolens, in shades of white, yellow or pink, is the most potent and flowers long into the autumn. The whole plant is poisonous, and the smell is narcotic, mysterious, and dangerous.
Medieval priests would have them torn up for fear of what the smell might inspire young girls to do in the night.
In Morocco, brugmansias grow as big as pear trees, one of the largest flowering shrubs there is but, tender in this country, you need to take cuttings or keep them frost-free over winter.
Their scent has the potency of lilies but the lightness of Magnolia grandiflora, which has perhaps the most magnificent of all summer night scents.
You really need to bury your head inside one of these immense creamy suede cups to smell the beetle-attracting pong from the anthers and nectaries.
This smell evolved so long ago, in fact as long as 90million years ago, and before there were any flying insects, only beetles.
Along with water lilies and lotus, which have a similarly phenomenal giant Jurassic smell, the bull bays or summer flowering magnolias have a rich fruity smell, vaguely citrus, but in the night somehow evoking the limestone of a great cool cathedral.
Isabel Bannerman is the author of Scent Magic (Pimpernel Press, £30). Visit books. telegraph.co.uk
Our mood is altered by the smell of green things – edible, arboreal and floral