There are zillions of smells in a garden and few of them are shy. Steer manure, potting soil, cocoa mulch, the dog shit you just stepped in. Alaska fish fertilizer, especially if the bottle was sitting in the sun before you opened it. Herbs, which I'll write about next week. Bone meal, if you're a dog anyway. The mint that you thought you'd ripped out. The compost heap. Water. Earth. Mud. The weeds and grass you yanked out an hour ago. After a morning in the garden my nose has to take the rest of the day off in a darkened room with a cool towel over it. I look funny without it, but what can you do?
But the odorous glamour and fame go to the sweet smelling plants, usually flowers. It's odd that so much commercial gardening -- florists and the people who develop new varieties of old plants -- don't seem to be interested in smell. Haven't read their Proust, or their Agatha Christie (Murder in Retrospect), or their Shakespeare, or their Keats:
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Ode to A Nightingale
"What soft incense hangs upon the boughs..." Gee, that guy could write -- and he died at 26.
My current favorite sweet smelling plants (they change every hour or so), in ascending order of awesomness:
PEONIES
These would be higher on the list, but they don't grow well here in SoCal (they like a cold winter). They're one of the flowers that has scented and non scented varieties, and visually they're so gorgeous that you can almost forgive the developers. But to get the eye candy WITH the amazing scent -- paradise!
LILIES
Oriental lilies, that is, not Asiatics. Asiatics are -- again! -- scentless. Stargazer is the best known Oriental, and Casa Blanca probably the most fragrant. I'm partial to Sumatra. Here's Stargazer:
I love the way they look because they so happily jump the shark. They're like little Liberaces or Chers.
ROSES
Victims of their own popularity, roses have been twisted out of all recognition, the Michael Jacksons of horticulture, and one of the first things to go was the fragrance. Many old and a few new varieties smell wonderful, though. Here's a rosa rugose, Roseraie de L'Hay.
Of the new varieties, many David Austen roses have a strong perfume. Of these, my favorites are Sharifa Asma (shell pink) and Abraham Darby (peach pink, sort of). But everyone has their own, including, in the hybrid teas,Mr. Lincoln. I've always wanted to try Souvenir de la Malmaison for its "strange and distinct spicy/fruity scent."
Here's an Abraham Darby:
SWEET PEAS (lathurus oderatum)
Sweet peas without scent (and there are a few varieties) are despicable. Luckily, most varieties have the inimitable sweet pea scent. A little bouquet of them will inundate a whole room.
They're usually staked (except the bush varieties, whose fragrance doesn't seem as strong to me), and in SoCal you're supposed to plant them in the fall, which I invariably forget to do. They're one of the few flowers that look much better cut and in a vase than out in the garden.
HELIOTROPE
Look at the gorgeous, exotic leaves, and imagine the sweet honey/vanilla scent:
They won't survive much of a freeze, so you have to grow them as annuals up north. In SoCal, they're perennial, and they get really big. At the Huntington Library in San Marino, there are BANKS of them. I came around a corner into a big expanse of them and you could almost see the perfume. I came all over dizzy with rapture.
I sometimes cut the flowers and put them in bouquets, but unlike sweet peas, they're much more wonderful outdoors, with their beautiful leaves.
SWEET ALYSSUM
Tied with heliotrope for my favorite sweet smeller. Whereas heliotrope is exotic -- the elusive cool kid on the next street over when you were little sweet alyssum or lobularia maritima, is your everyday best friend, with whom you spent every afternoon (except Easter Basket, a mealymouthed variety that was like the kid next door who always told on you). It's perennial in SoCal, and I think it always came back up north, too. It smells like vanilla, and you'll always have bees in your garden.
Jasmine, gardenias, mignonette, nicotiana, pikaki, and honeysuckle are all magnificent stinkers too. What are your faves?