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.