Perfumed plants smell of success

I picked a big bunch of sweet peas recently, and the smell was really wonderful.

Scent is an amazing feature of certain flowers in the garden, and can make us feel so good.

Sweet peas have that very sugary perfume, for me it is the best - no bought perfume is anything like it.

It transports me to beautiful places, with music playing and happy children around. The fact that it is only at this time of year, for a fairly short time, adds to the allure.

There are so many different smells in a garden, not all of them as lovely as the sweet peas.

The dracunculus has a really fearful, stinking smell, although so wonderful to certain small insects that it lures them to their death.

I first saw it in Crete, where it grows on the mountains, and is nearly as tall as I am.

It belongs to the same family as our Lords and Ladies, or Cuckoo Pint, and sends up a huge sheath which is coloured inside like raw meat, and smells like rotting flesh. Insects find it irresistible, and fall into it, where they scramble about and pollinate the flower inside.

On a warm summers evening, the mock orange flowers are very strong, and waft across the garden.

There is a great choice of these shrubs, Belle Etoile has purple markings on the flowers, there are golden leaved ones and cream and green leaves, all have the superb scent when in flower,

A tree that will be flowering quite soon now is the colletia hystrix, with white or pink flowers set among the most ferocious spikes.

All the leaves are turned into thorns so that the tree is really impossible to touch. I have seen many a nose bleeding from the attempt to smell the flowers.

This tree has a fragrance that is like vanilla, all the garden is pervaded by the scent of it, usually in September. Insects love it, and it can be covered by bees and butterflies on a sunny day.

One of the scents of summer is lavender. The fragrance is so familiar, and is caught for all sorts of reasons for use in the trade.

Lavender bags, lavender sachets and lavender scented pillows; they are all on sale at every craft centre. Whole fields of lavender are grown to provide for the essence, which is the basis of lavender water or perfume.

In the garden there are plenty of types to choose. Munstead is a good dwarf bush, or there are pink types or white.

French lavender has slightly different heads, and is not quite so hardy. All of them should be cut back as soon as the flowers are over, to keep the bushes young and avoid them getting 'leggy'.

By Pat Edwards