HEAVEN SCENT

One of the joys of gardening is taking time to enjoy the fruits of your labour. This might be sitting down with a cuppa and just enjoying the outdoor picture you have created. Or it could be wandering around, observing plant life up close, enjoying its beauty and watching butterflies flitting about and bees burrowing for nectar.

Or you might be a sniffer, taking enormous pleasure inhaling deeply the perfumes, getting high on roses!

Scent often takes a second place in garden design as initially we try to get things looking the way we want them and it’s only afterwards that we think about introducing fragrance.

Research has found that smell links to the emotional regions of our brains more directly than any of the other senses and we are all familiar with the power of scent to trigger memories as far back as our childhoods. At the back of my house I have a verandah, a second floor covered deck which you reach by means of a spiral staircase.

I decided to plant the stairs so that greenery would clamber up and reach the second floor, bringing the garden closer to the house. I used Star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) which, once settled in its planting hole last autumn, started its climb upwards this spring.

What’s surprised me over the past month or so is the scent that envelops me as I run up or down.

Star jasmine has small white flowers but they make their presence known with the sweetest smell!

The wisteria that drips from the upper balcony smells absolutely wonderful as well but its season is so brief I will need to supplement it with another climber – perhaps a honeysuckle such as ‘Graham Thomas’ with its creamy white flowers that become more fragrant by night.

Star jasmine have small flowers with big power