As well as being a visual feast, a garden can become a fragrant haven, says Heloise Brooke, head gardener at the National Trust’s Calke Abbey in Derbyshire. Here, she advises on plants to include for year-round perfume promise

The sweet violet, Viola odorata, may be a diminutive flower, but its small, slightly asymmetrical, pansy-like flowers are highly fragrant. They open in early spring before most plants have even though

I love growing summer flowers from seed for my cutting garden and to fill gaps in borders and containers to bloom all season on my patio and garden table. I sow hardy and half-hardy annuals alongside

Louise Curley celebrates spring’s homegrown and low-carbon blooms, showing how to pick for months and arrange them in garden-gathered style

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Modest, alluring and versatile, Viola odorata, or sweet violet, is a small, hardy, herbaceous perennial that tumbles and scrambles close to the ground, forming dense clumps of dainty, heart-shaped, gr