Personalise your home’s perfume and experience the nostalgic, mood-boosting benefits of a signature scent for your surroundings

From floral to fragranceless, there’s a biological reason behind a rose’s missing odour today

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

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

It’s out with winter blues and in with the blossoming prunus, unless it happens to be English pottery. Lucien de Guise finds out what Coalport brought to the tableware

From ice cream to underwear and explosives, plants are remarkably integral to much of the manmade world, as a new book reveals. Harry Pearson investigates