It cannot be seen or touched, but fragrance adds so much to any garden – all it takes is the right plants, says Monty
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 west-facing, 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��
