A garden of fragrance, please.

I currently live in an apartment without even a balcony, let alone a garden. I'd love to have a garden again. If or when I'm next lucky enough to have a little patch of green space I'm going to fill it with beautifully fragrant flowering plants. In the meantime, I try to have cut flowers that are scented in my home and on my desk at work. They brighten my day. I love the smell of flowers. I love to walk into a room, open a window, or sit on a park bench and catch the scent of a beautiful bloom. 

And like many smells, the fragrance of flowers is incredibly evocative; redolent with emotion, evoking deep and lasting memories of places, people and happenings. 

Unlike the other senses, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation.

Diane Ackerman

(1948-)

A Natural History of the Senses

If we do try to describe smells in words, we find it's very hard to do so without referring to how they make us feel - "disgusting", "lovely", "nostalgic"... The smell of flowers generally has very positive associations for me.

These are some of my favourites, and some of the things they remind me of:

• Frangipani - Buddhist temples and shrines; warm night air wrapping me and my sister in the buoyant, carefree spirit of a tropical island interlude; watching sunrise from a beach in Zanzibar on the first day of the new millennium, with all the peace, trust and hope that moment held.
  
• Gardenias - My mother, beautiful in a black dress, younger than I am now; two little girls making "perfume"; reading a book curled up on cushions in a sunspot, in a conservatory.

• Freesias - Being a flower-girl in a yolk-yellow, floral-print lawn dress, with my hair curled and my heart full, at the age of four or five; Easter holidays with my cousins and siblings; affordable cut flower treats bought from a local street stall.
  
• Lily of the Valley - Nana; living in Paris on May Day; Crabtree & Evelyn milled soap, received in a Christmas parcel, posted with stamps of red-breasted Robins and love.

• Iceberg Roses - My great aunt Jess, so worldy, so sophisticated; cut crystal vases on a glass-topped dressing table; lying on the lawn in a historic rose garden, on long summer days, watching cloud animals pass overhead.
  
• Jasmine - My first kiss; spring in Cape Town, a brief but magical season; a high school friend who was murdered but still visits me in my dreams to tell me that he loves me. I still love him too - always will.

• Snowdrops - A dear friend's February Birthday dinner parties where they always appear, and a painting in her welcoming hallway; a walk in the woods wearing borrowed Wellington boots, two sizes too big; a dusting of snow in the Peace Park, last March, numb inside and out.
  
• Madonna Lilies - Living in Harrow-on-the-Hill with six housemates and two cats, fun-filled days in an overgrown garden; pollen on a favourite dress; the cool interior of a church, dressed for a wedding - not mine...
  

Smells are surer than sights or sounds

To make your heart-strings crack

Rudyard Kipling

(1865-1936)

[Flickr credits]