A sensitivity to smell In an extract from her new book The Star-Nosed Mole, designer Isabel Bannerman combines her stunning botanical images with an anthology of garden writing in her musings on scent
In this extract from her new book, Isabel Bannerman explains her need to marry dramatic, botanical images with poetry and prose to conjure the scents of the gardening year – and the emotions and memories they evoke
Iobsess about smell, hedonistically and emotionally. The sense of smell is a layer of experience somewhat blasted aside by its closely allied twin sense of taste, and the profoundly dominant vision, and perhaps – as almost nowhere is truly silent any more – the even more dominant auditory world. I became interested in whether smell is a diminishing experience. My reading for my book Scent Magic – Notes from a Gardener suggested that pollution, particulates, toxins and gases, actively destroy the fine volatiles detected by living organisms in the air and earth and sea. Pollution and distraction have ambushed our wellbeing. As I was trying to write about the impossibility of writing effectively about smell, I began to nose around for great writers’ solutions to this problem. How and how much have writers considered the lilies of the field and how they smell. I began grazing on literature and gathering in my stores of quotes. For instance, in Jonathan Franzen’s Purity I loved this passage: ‘heaven …Two scents at once, distinct like layers of cooler and warmer water in a lake – some instantly flowering tropical tree’s perfume, a complex lawn-smell from a pasture that goats were grazing – flooded through her open window. Heaven …’
In 2003 I had started making images of plants on my flatbed scanner. A very intense process that I tend to indulge in late at night, in the dark, which is how I discovered how to make it work. Making images with plants is a messy, sticky, visceral operation, all floating pollen and oozings. I have to keep
the plants cool and work fast before they collapse. In the morning I often find my office, a small file-filled submarine, filled with scent. Many flowers emit more scent when stressed or dying in a last gasp for paternity. The pictures happened then, by a kind of accident and they seemed to have an ethereal otherness, a bit like scent. Another thing that ignited my inner child. I wanted to write a book about the uncanny feeling, the unsettling disorder, the subjective, the inadequacies of the intellect, the obscurity of intuition. These illustrations appear as an adjunct, but in fact they were the instigator of this quest because I was looking for a way to make the images have purpose, and at the same time I realised I wanted to write about gardening and smell.
What makes the heart leap and breathing quicken? Twilight; the gone summers; butterflies; moths; sensuality; synaesthesia; perception; olfaction; balance and ecology; catastrophe and the groping for meaning – all well up and beg for attention. How enriching would it be to attend to these questions. Age diminishes the senses. Sight, hearing, touch, taste and, by equal degrees, smell evaporate, depart, harden, muffle and dim. We live in a constantly altering state, swimming in flows and currents of perception, much of which is invisible or goes unnoticed. To take time now to analyse a minuscule, highly personal, bandwidth of all that vastness of experience, to shine a small beam and encourage the hedonistic pleasures of smelling and reading what others have smelled became my mission.