The scent of WINTER These colder months are full of the evocative perfume of seasonal blooms
Neil and I think we both had Covid earlier last year – in March. Thankfully we’d just met our delightful new grandson, Bill, and had a chance to play with our equally delightful granddaughter, Sydney. When we returned from a London trip after seeing them all, we both became poorly. In common with many others who have it, one of the symptoms we experienced was losing our sense of taste and smell. Even now some things just don’t taste the same but, thankfully, my sense of smell returned rapidly, for which I’m eternally grateful.
Scents, perfumes and aromas occupy an important place and add an extra dimension to our experience of the world. They’re so evocative and meaningful. Not only do the great majority of them instantly supply great pleasure, but the memories they bring back remind us of times, places and people.
Have you ever noticed how people tend to close their eyes when enjoying a scent, whether it be flower or food? Isn’t that because we’re enjoying the whole experience – memories, connections and all, and nothing else must get in the way.
Our sense of smell is direct; our brains don’t need to process the aroma or perfume in the same way our eyes see a colour and send a message to our brains.
When I smell a snowdrop, I’m transported – there we are, my brothers, cousins, our grandma and me in the glass lean-to through from her little kitchen. She breaks the sealing wax and unties the string on a small brown paper parcel that’s arrived from Cornwall from one of her sisters. Inside is a cardboard box and, as she lifts the lid, the twin perfumes of damp moss and honeyed snowdrop flowers assail the nostrils of the company clustered round her knee.
Though this was 70 years ago, I can smell it now. Just outside the porch was the coal hole and the outside loo and then grandad’s garden – narrow beds full of patriotic bedding during the summer; red salvias, blue lobelia and the white supplied by alyssum, whose sweet perfume I can call to mind as easily as wink. In the early spring, Daphne odora, grown from a fat orange berry, put on its show of sweetly scented flowers covering the leafless stems. Around its feet were velvety auriculas with their own unique fragrance.
The gardening year is full of perfume, but perhaps we notice it most during the colder months when there’s little competition from brightly coloured flowers and the all-over verdancy that summer brings.
Years ago we went to film for BBC Gardener’s World at Anglesey Abbey, in Cambridgeshire, where they have a winter garden. It was cold and breathtakingly beautiful but the abiding memory is of the perfume of Viburnum carlesii and sarcococca hanging in the wintry air.
Even when we can’t visit gardens, those of us who have been lucky enough to enjoy ‘winter gardens’ will be able to recall those delightful fragrances and hopefully this time next year we’ll be able to experience them all over again.