Scent

Our garden is really quite small, but it's private, not overlooked at all, and a delight to sit, especially in on a sunny day, being sheltered from most of the prevailing winds.  It's also well stocked with attractive flowers, and especially with well-scented flowers.

This means that we do have to share our ground with the local bees and other insects, but on the whole I don't mind.  Locally, I'm told that many beekeepers have been having to feed their bees with sugar, as it's been too cold and wet for them to forage for pollen and nectar;  let's hope the improving weather makes life better both for the bees themselves and those who keep them.

For me, however beautiful a flower may be, it's only doing half a job is it has no scent.  When my wife and I are touring gardens, or for that matter just walking in the countryside, we're always pausing not only to admire blooms and blossoms, but to sniff at them.  But the colours and scents that we find lovely are also highly purposeful: plants wouldn't be doing these things if there wasn't a pay-off - and the pay-off is the sort of insect activity that not only keeps beekeepers happy but ensures a new generation both of the flowers we find so attractive, and of course the insects and other creatures that pollenate them.

Not all flowers smell attractive to us, of course.  Some need to attract the sort of insects that aren't attracted to the kind of smells we like - flies for example, that are much more enamoured of rotting flesh than of honey pots. The huge flowers of the Asian genus Rafflesia, for example, famously have "a penetrating smell more repulsive than any buffalo carcass in an advanced stage of decomposition" (Mjoberg, 1928).  Closer to home, the stinking iris (Iris foetidissima) really does do what it says on the plant label, and the quite attractive yellow archangel (Galium galeobdolon) which we use as ground cover at Brookfield Road has a specific name that suggests it "stinks like a weasel" which, though I haven't ever sniffed a whole lot of weasels, is probably true.

They all have their part to play, and a garden is such a good place in which to see the interconnectedness of nature at work.  Just now, with the evening sun still lingering on our shed roof and the sounds and smells of nearby barbecues suggesting a bit of summer has actually happened here at last, it's lovely to see the bees still busily at work on our lavender.