Monty focuses his planting at Longmeadow to make pockets of seasonal scent
PHOTO: JASON INGRAM
“Good gardening creates mixtures of scent as carefully and deliberately as any perfumer”
Years ago, in the heady days of the 1980s, before the crash of 1988, we worked on developing a ‘Monty Don’ perfume that would sell alongside our jewellery. It never reached production, but the research was fun and extremely daunting. We wanted something delicious and irresistible, obviously, but defining these was both complex and ultimately subjective – one person’s ‘delicious’ might wrinkle another’s nose. I love, for example, the musky tang of imperial fritillaries, although many regard them as tainted with the reek of a fox marking its territory. Each to their scented own. With colours we learn an absolute standard, and even though the application of those standards can be fairly arbitrary, we have a good idea of what is meant by the word ‘red’ or ‘green’. But we nearly always describe a smell in terms of something else, as surprisingly few things have an identifiable smell. In the garden, pears do, as does box, tomatoes and freshly cut grass. But if we have to describe the smells to someone who has never experienced them, we immediately start to fumble inadequately.
Scent – however you enjoy it – is vital in any garden, and good gardening creates places of fragrance and mixtures of scent as carefully and deliberately as any perfumer. Put simply, we want uplifting, bright fragrances in the morning, to be stopped in our tracks during the day as we dip into the scented pool that stands around some plants, and to be seduced by heavier, more languid scents at night.
Focus on fragrance
If you design an area primarily for sitting in during the evening, it should be westfacing, sheltered, preferably with a stone or paved surface and, ideally, a brick or stone wall. These surfaces will hold the heat as the air cools, intensifying the scents as well as making it comfortable to sit out for longer. There is much to be said for focusing scent in certain parts of the garden – rather than just randomly dotting fragrance around. The most obvious way to do this is around a seat, on a patio or near a doorway into the garden, but it works well along an enclosed path so that you pass through a fragrant tunnel.
Choosing the palette of scents is mostly about selecting plants that will provide fragrance for as much of the year as possible rather than playing with the perfumer’s art of melding different plants to produce the perfume you like best – possible, but distinctly tricky. The first thing to do is to take stock of when and how you use the garden. If your custom is to stand outside drinking a final cup of tea before setting off for work in the morning, it makes sense to plant something that will smell at its best at that time. However, if you hardly go into the garden until you come home in the evening, it is sensible to choose plants that release their scent at night.
Flowers that are night-scented tend to be white or pale coloured, which increases their visibility, and they release their scent as the air cools. This adaptation reduces the competition to attract a pollinator and increases the chances of the pollinating insect moving on to another plant from the same family – both devices designed to improve the plant’s chances of evolutionary success. Plants that smell their very best at night include Nicotiana sylvestris, night scented stock, honeysuckles, and whiteflowering shrubs such as philadelphus, lilac, osmanthus and viburnum.
I particularly love foliage that releases its scent when touched, not least because this triggering of the fragrance means that you engage more directly with it rather than simply being a recipient. Scented-leaf pelargoniums have an astonishing range of smells, all mimicking other plants, such as Pelargonium tomentosum’s smell of peppermint or the pine scent of P. fragrans. Rosemary, mint, basil and lavender instantly smell when crushed, as do bay and citrus leaves. The scent of warm box leaves is strongly evocative for me; once you start to notice these things it is surprising how many plants have not just their own signature scent but also how meaningful it is for us in our own ways, tapping directly into our private memories.
Sow one packet of sweet peas for a garden full of scent in June
“There is much to be said for focusing scent in certain parts of the garden”
Honeysuckle is ideal up a wall or trellis by an evening seat. It is easy to grow and smells fruitily delicious. Lonicera periclymenum ‘Belgica’ is as lovely as it is ubiquitous. L. x americana has a distinct scent of cloves and L. japonica ‘Halliana’ is especially good for a shady, even north, wall.
Clematis armandii is the best scented of all clematis and the blossomy white flowers are carried among large evergreen leaves. The variety ‘Apple Blossom’, which has a pinkish cast to the flowers, has a strong vanilla scent. I find a little jasmine goes a long way, and is a fine climber to bathe the evening air with its heavy fragrance. Sweet peas can never smell too much but, alas, too many modern varieties smell far too little. Grow the grandiflora mixes or named varieties such as ‘Painted Lady’.