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.