Gardening for the 5 Senses Part III: Fragrance Gardening
Fragrance is the essence of memory. The scent of pine makes us remember Christmas past; the aroma of baking bread can take us back to childhood, and one sniff of sea air can bring back a childhood vacation at the shore.
Fragrance is also a powerful mood creator. The sharp tang of lavender may make us nostalgic for a simpler past, but it also stimulates. Let the combined essences of ginger, cinnamon and apple drift by and we feel warm and nostalgic and very much in a world that is our dream of what home represents.
Fragrance can be one of the most powerful elements of the garden. To sit on a warm stone bench on a sunny day, feeling the sun on your skin, hearing the buzz of bees and the song of the birds, gazing at the color and texture of the flowers is a rare thing; add the scent of roses and honeysuckle and you have placed yourself in an earthly paradise.
Unfortunately, when gardeners of yore became enamored with bigger and better flowers, with double flowers in colors not found in species plants, something was lost. Gardens became full to overflowing with the gorgeous blooms of hybrid flowers. Birds still sang, the sun still shone-but the fragrance disappeared. Oh, we still had the occasional sweet pea, which, even at its most rarified new form retained its scent. But many roses became mere pretty pictures; nicotiana, the most fragrant of evening flowers became a short and colorful front-of-the border plant devoid of any scent at all.
Fortunately, gardeners finally noticed the missing element and started to clamor for the return of the old-fashioned flowers that made a garden a natural perfumery.
One wildly popular scented plant these days is the scented geranium. Available in fragrances from rose to lemon to apple, these often unassuming -looking plants are a delight to brush up against in the garden. A collection of them can yield almost the entire spectrum of garden perfumes. Take a look at Papa Geno's for a list of the many possibilities.
There are those, however, who prefer the real plant to the imitation scent of the geranium. For many, the essence of summer is the scent of the old garden roses. Interestingly, there is wide disagreement about which roses are really the most fragrant. The ability to discern scent seems to vary with the individual, so that what is overpoweringly fragrant to one person may be all but scent-less to another. Still, there are many varieties that are conceded to be extremely fragrant for most people. The Rosefinder provides a good list of these.
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