Scent

I've just caught up with a lovely Posy blog post on scent.  I love scent as much as I love colour. I enjoy essential oils and incense - generally Japanese or Chinese incenses which are complex and elegant and enticing.

I love to mix flowers and leaves in a vase to blend their fragrances.

Today I have a posy of wild fennel fronds and jasmine flowers. The liquorice smell of the fennel blends magically with the creamy jasmine.

I always grow as many scented plants as I can fit in my garden, and every year I make up blends from the dried flowers and leaves. Each year's mix is different.

I don't use a fixative - although bay leaves tend to deepen and preserve the scent of any mix. A few of my mixtures have kept their fragrance for years, but generally they only last a year and I renew them each autumn.

Here are this week's rose petals, the beginning of this year's mixture. 

And this is one of my dearest treasures. I have kept these little sweet boxes for forty years now. Inside is the still fragrant pot pourri I made from the flowers of my mother's garden the year I left home. I gave one box to Mum and took the other with me.

When my mother died it was in her box of special treasures. Now whenever I open the lids I can still smell the particular fragrance of that garden, that summer.

Lemon leaves

I put out my coolest colours in my reading/sewing corner yesterday. On the table is a jug of lemon leaves from my tree and a basket of the same.

And when I got up hot and creased this morning after a night of 29 degree heat (at 2 am the dogs woke me up to tell me about it), I took a cup of green tea and sank into my corner with relief.

Now, about the lemon leaves. A jug full of fresh lemon leaves fills a room with a cool lemon scent. Lemon flowers have a richer, tangier scent, and if you pick them you lose the lemons they will become, so I rarely pick  the flowers.
The artificial lemon smell of so many washing and cleaning products is a mere lemon stink once you smell the real thing.

Lemon leaves can be dried for pot pourri or better still, can be put in a bath or a basin, soaked in boiling water and when cool the lemon leaf water will sooth hot and dusty feet. Be careful if you want to soak deeply in a bathtub of lemon leaf water. The oil is strongly antiseptic and can be very harsh on tender skin or intimate anatomical parts.

Hot and purple

I've been overcome by the heat. It's been like late summer here rather than late spring with 30 degree plus days even in cool Ballarat, no rain in a month when we expect rain, and the plants in the garden are racing to keep up.

The garden has been briefly full of beauties like these, old-fashioned  iris that I've acquired from old gardens and roadsides.

They rushed into bloom and plants that usually flower all through November had finished in two weeks. I've saved a few pictures of them.

The hot weather has made the lavender bushes happy. I gathered five baskets of lavender from the garden, the English lavender that preserves against moth and decay.

It dried in a couple of hot days and I made simple lavender bags to sweeten the shelf of winter flannel sheets

and to protect the newly -washed, sun-dried winter woollies folded away in the cupboard waiting the cold on a day that feels as if cold will never come again.

Summer roses

After a burst of envy for autumn pleasures of halloween parties and bonfires, I went out into the garden this morning and was overwhelmed by the scent and colour of the roses. They have loved the alternate days of rain and warmth this last week.

The fat buds of this rose darken to a black-red and the flowers have an rich perfume. I don't know what it is as I've grown it from a cutting, but I call it, a bit prosaically, my cooking rose. I make a beautiful rose sorbet with this rose, and it makes an intensely rose syrup that goes well with custards.  When it's cooked it turns a grey-purple, but after it cools or is frozen it becomes a deep and glorious pink. There were enough blossoms on the bush for me to pick some for the house. Last year I made delicious almond-meal cupcakes glazed with its pink, rose-scented icing.

My yellow tea rose is covered with buds too. I've tried to use this rose in syrups etc but its cool scent and its rich yellow colour don't survive the cooking process. It does, however, dry very well and keeps its colour and scent in a pot pourri.

Mandarins once again

I love to see the mandarins heaped up in the shops in Autumn.I love their scent and colour and the crumply feel of them. Mandarins make the best fruit juice, not a luxury at all when they are, briefly, cheap and plentiful.

All the peel can be saved and dried over a couple of weeks on a sunny windowsill. It makes wonderful aromatic beef dishes and sweet bean soups in a Chinese kitchen, and it adds zing to a pot pourri.