The big picture

Some of the most unprepossessing flowers can surprise you with a perfume so heavenly, it takes your breath away, says MICHAEL McCOY

It’s a grey, late-winter’s day in London in the 1930s, and you’re wandering down a busy street, mind elsewhere, with your collar turned up against the cold. Suddenly, you’re stopped in your tracks by a perfume so heavenly and so complex that you’re temporarily disorientated. It’s like nothing you’ve ever smelt before. Without knowing it, you’ve wandered past a florist’s shop and have stumbled on the scent of boronia for the first time in your life.

As Aussies growing up with the scent, it’s well-nigh impossible to imagine such a scenario, or how you’d respond. But I remember reading this story in a gardening mag from between the wars. The writer, in a perfume-induced stupor, was wildly and erratically clutching about him for descriptors. “Like honeysuckle, and freesias, and daphne; like lupins blowing in the sea wind on the sandhills, and briar roses in the dawn; like primroses and cowslips, and ripe apples in summer orchards; like honey, and cream, and apricots. And you shut your eyes and take a deep breath; and even at the risk of letting the gods hear, you say, ‘Life is a singing flame of joy’.”

Then you can only imagine him tracing the scent back to those unassuming brown flowers, hanging among short, needle-like foliage, and wondering if he’d got the whole thing wrong.

For there’s something genuinely confusing about perfume of this degree of sophistication arising from a plant of such visual modesty.

I remember, myself, being almost as delighted, surprised and stuck for words the first time that I ever encountered wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) in bloom, on a midwinter’s day during

my uni years. The dirty-yellow flowers, with the unappealing transparency of an accidentally frozen lettuce, stick downwards on graceless, bare stems. The emphatic unshowiness of the blooms is such that you’re never really sure if it’s fully in flower.

But then the scent hits you. It’s spicy, it’s sharp, it’s sweet and it’s warm. Like violets and wallflowers, it leaves you wondering if the ambient temperature has been measurably lifted, within smelling distance, by the perfume. Into the scent mix is thrown a touch of jonquil and a dash of freesia. It’s an early-winter gift like no other. Unfortunately, like boronia, wintersweet has little to offer, beyond its scent. The sandpaper-rough foliage, and the shape of the plant, are without charm. Definitely one to shove into an old, forgotten corner of the garden, if you’re lucky enough to have such a thing.

But plants that are more appealing to the nose than to the eye are a great reminder that garden life extends way beyond the visual, and that, with the activation of each of our senses, there are layers of riches to be discovered and priceless pleasures to be harvested. There are whole, complex ecosystems of scent and sound that surround us, and define our spaces to a far greater extent than our scant attention to them would suggest.

And how wonderful – and curious – that something so simple as a scent could lift us to a place where, virtually lost for words, we blurt out, “Life is a singing flame of joy.” I ask no more, nor less, from my garden.

Michael blogs at thegardenist.com.au