Flowers tend to be sweetly scented; leaf fragrances are more spicy and subtle. Leaves often require heat, being stepped on or rubbed between your fingers to release their essence.
FLOWERS DELIVER the biggest hit of garden perfume, but oh so briefly. Leaves, on the other hand, last for months, and many of them are delightfully, surprisingly pungent. In a good way.
We grow vegetables and fruit because it’s such a pleasure to step outside and clip lettuces or pluck plums. But there’s more to growing food than a delicious harvest: Edible plants add dimensionality to our gardens. Once you start eating what you grow, you’re no longer just looking at your plants.
It’s the same with fragrance. Scent engages the most primitive, reptilian part of our brain, stirring up long-forgotten memories and associations. We’re reminded that our gardens aren’t just scenes to admire or work to accomplish, but places to stir the senses, to come more wholly alive.
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Fragrance is perhaps the quickest way to sink deeply into garden joys. How often have you paused to inhale some lovely (and sometimes not so lovely) scent you’ve unearthed by mangling some leaves, slicing through a root or digging up bulbs?
Flowers tend to be sweetly scented; leaf fragrances are more spicy and subtle. Leaves often require heat, being stepped on or rubbed between your fingers to release their essence.
I grow lots of rosemary and lavender, agastache and mint, and one warm, dry day late last summer I swear my garden smelled like Tuscany. Ever since I went hiking in the hills of Mexico where every other wildflower is a sage, I’ve loved that sinus-clearing blast of resin scent released from dry-land plants. And to have that kind of smell in my own garden, available anytime I take a moment to crush a leaf of lavender or a needle of rosemary, is a brain-transporting luxury.
Since aromatic foliage will never release the swoon-inducing perfume of an Oriental lily, a good strategy is to use leaves in layers, from ground covers to trees. This way you have the best chance of catching a whiff every time you go into the garden.
Good choices at ground level are Corsican mint, creeping orange and caraway thyme — any or all of which can be grown between steppingstones or pavers where you’ll step on them and release their fragrance.
One layer up come kitchen herbs. Lemon verbena is willowy and seriously citrusy. Mint is great, too, but you don’t want it loose in your garden where it’ll run wild, so be sure to grow it in containers. Its culinary uses are as varied as its scent, which comes in pineapple, apple and chocolate mint, among others.
Scented-leaf geraniums (which botanically are really pelargoniums) are the great mimics of the garden. These little annuals have leaves that smell like everything from roses to coconut. The flowers are small, the leaves are pretty, and the perfume is so heady that I always keep a few in pots by my back door to inhale their fragrance as I pass.
People have relied on the soul-soothing scents of rosemary and lavender for millennia, growing these Mediterranean plants for medicinal and culinary uses. Along with being supremely fragrant, both are tough and beautiful landscape plants. As are the sages. All need perfect drainage and as much sun as you can give them.
For scented foliage overhead year-round, nothing beats a hardy eucalyptus. For one of the most beguiling and endlessly debated garden scents ever, plant a katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum). In autumn when its leaves turn gold, they smell strongly of cinnamon — although some people say they smell more like brown sugar, cotton candy, vanilla or caramel.
How we interpret and react to scents is extremely individual. So take this as permission to hang out in your favored local nursery or garden center, taking time to smell the leaves.
Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of “petal & twig.” Check out her blog at www.valeaston.com.