The house smells delirious. Flowers blend into a Jo Malone
concoction: rosemary, lavender, wisteria, geranium, with a faint underwhiff of
dirt filtering through the open windows, filling the house with scent. A hint
of dirt is a thing, you know, in your
costlier, more complex, fragrances.
I’m a little surprised at this pungent kaleidoscope, as the
day is chill and damp, not the humid warmth I expect we need to cajole such a lavish
bouquet.
The rosemary is doing well in the upper window boxes; there
are three across the front of the house. I planted it with some hesitation,
late last summer, when my latest notion for a permanent centerpiece had
flopped, as usual. While rosemary survives in our gardens, remaining green
through the winter, always a plus, the shallower depth of window boxes presents
a challenge when the temperature dips below freezing for a stretch. And
rosemary can be…overpowering, perhaps too much so for a bedroom window.
Now pushing two feet tall – really
making a statement up there - they turned out to be surprisingly mild, and
handy for a stew or two. So I was planning to add a few more to the lower boxes
this Spring but, as these things happen, while poking about a garden center on
Sunday, the Prince and I were gob smacked by a French lavender of particular
allure. Rather costly, I thought, at $9 for the pot. But it was large enough to
split, which I did, whacking the hard root in two. It’s doing quite nicely.
I’ve gotten surprisingly good at dividing and propagating,
but that’s a story for another week.
We also bought sweet potato vines for the box fronts, lovely
acid green ruffles that cascade over the boxes and drop, reaching the tops of
the lower windows by August. These obscure the fact that some of the geraniums,
so cheerfully pink, are fake. This is, as I’ve said at least once before, a
neat trick, a floral trompe l'oeil that delights the eye –
but only if done subtly, just a few frilly pops of artifice mixed into an
honest display of flowers and greens.
So the fragrant lavender floats up to billow around the
rosemary, a delightful pairing, and mingles with our neighbor’s wisteria, a
massive thing that drifts along her roofline in a flotilla of purple blossoms so
voluminous it could threaten North
Korea. Hers is the right sort of wisteria
(Japanese), as opposed to our wrong sort (Chinese) which howls at us from the
depths of the garden, throwing off a meager scentless bloom or two each year –
hidden within mountainous foliage. If you’re going to put up with this
malicious, highly invasive monster, that strangles anything in its path, it
should at least bring a sweet smelling spring flower show. You are warned.
Threading it all together is the absolutely intoxicating
scent of the mock orange that blooms
beside the pond. I’ve snipped sprigs and branches for vases, scattered about
the house, so I can stop here and there and close my eyes and drift.
It all clips by so fast, these April scents. But soon the
Don Juan rose that clambers up the back porch railings will be in blood red bloom,
and the honeysuckle that smothers the back fence will add its syrupy note. I
don’t like to go anywhere for long, this time of year, sitting still and
sniffing is such pleasure.
If you’d like to explore scented gardens, the Prince bought
me a delicious little book several years ago: Fragrant Designs, from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. https://shop.bbg.org/a575/fragrant-designs.html
. There are plants perfect for evening, for the yard, and for containers; the
needs of each, and growing tips. The reading it is almost as tasty as the
sniffing.
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