The scent in flowers comes from their essential oils which are the key component in making perfume. These chemically complex oils are volatile, reacting with the atmosphere to produce many different aromas. Intensity varies throughout the season and the life of the plant. Generally, the scent is richest when the flowers are just about to open and most evident on warm and humid days.
Smell is strongly connected to memory, since it registers in the part of the brain used for feelings and emotions. Who hasn’t encountered a particular smell and had it evoke a long forgotten memory....perhaps of playing as a child in freshly mown grass or embracing a favorite elderly aunt who always smelled of lavender. For me, the aroma of a ripe mango transports me back to the first time my husband and I went to Barbados. And yet, despite this universality of scent-related experiences, it is difficult to find language to adequately describe scents. As Kay Sanecki points out in Gardening with Flowers, "The quality of a scent is a highly personal appreciation, consequently a curiously inadequate vocabulary has evolved to describe plant scents. One plant is often used to name the scent of another: violet-scented, pineapple-scented, almondy, minty or musky."
Mother Nature did not, however, imbue her floral offspring with such luscious fragrance entirely for our enjoyment. Fragrance is actually a means of survival in the flower kingdom. Pollinators are attracted to flowers with a strong scent, thus ensuring that the flower species will continue to thrive.
Some of the most amazingly fragrant flowers I have grown are the Oriental lilies. Their large blossoms give off a rich, spicy perfume that is evident as soon as you walk into the garden. This bulb grows happily in containers and likes well-drained soil, kept moist. Don’t cut them back until leaves and stems have turned yellow in the fall. ‘Stargazer’, rosy red with white margins and ‘Casablanca’, pure white, are two lilies worth adding to your garden. The lily lures insects with its strong scent, specifically to ensnare them on pollen-bearing anthers that protrude from the blossom.
No discussion of fragrance would be complete without mentioning the rose, prized for its attar and its romantic scent. There are many beautifully fragrant roses in the Old Garden Rose category, notably the damask ‘Rose de Rescht’, the bourbon ‘Louise Odier’ and the hybrid rugosa ‘Schneezwerg’. Modern roses as a whole are less fragrant, this attribute having been compromised in breeding for continual bloom, disease resistance or stature and form. ‘Angel Face’, ‘Secret’, ‘Chrysler Imperial’ and ‘Blue Nile’ are some of the more fragrant modern roses.
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