Smoke and Mirrors Issue 2 - Landscaping a Fragrance Garden
Landscaping a Fragrance Garden
by Lucia Chambers
By following just a few simple guidelines, you can landscape for the purposes of utility, harmony, and fragrance, all at the same time. The simple solution is to plant shrubby herbs in place of privets, and then orchestrate a potpourri of scents with the prevailing, ever-changing wind.
A fragrance garden becomes a large perfume vat, where the various scents intermingle on breezes, drift on the wind to your nose, and then change spontaneously with the next shift in wind direction. You must plan your main garden feature around what you like, and most importantly, the scents that will move and combine to create your living potpourri.
First you must decide what your main feature will be. Do you enjoy cooking with basil? Do you snip rosemary for the stew pot, and lemon verbena for your iced tea? Do you want a large swath of color in your garden, or would you rather have a colorful blend of flowers, a smattering of pointillism in the shimmering heat of summer?
No matter what style or palette you use, it's best to include several plants from the following list of "most pungent" plants as your "fixative" so that all other plants will intermingle in strongest combination:
Lavender Rugosa Roses Lilies
Sage Wisteria Stocks
Mint Daphne Nicotiana alata
Rosemary Lilac Hyacinths
Camomile Jasmine Sambac Orchids
Basil Gardenia Mignonette
Coriander Boxwood Carnations
Wormwood Fragrant Roses Dianthus
Southernwood Violets
Savory
You can mix similar fragrances to heighten a specific effect, such as mixing lavender with fennel and mignonette to achieve an extremely sweet edible aroma, or basil with tomato and lime pelargonium (scented geranium) plants for a garden that smells like a Bloody Mary!
When visitors discover the source of the fragrance, they often begin to touch leaves, to ask permission to pluck a leaf or tendril, and so you must consider the scented geraniums as important additions to your summer garden as well as the more permanently resident plants. All pelargoniums* are excellent in combination too, and there is an enormous variety of fragrant flowering and non-flowering varieties, including: Rober's Lemon Rose, Apricot, Peppermint, Lime, Grey Lady Plymouth, Oak Moss, Cinnamon, and Rose.
Boxwood is a good backdrop for any other plant, and in fact, makes a more beautiful and denser hedge than privet. Boxwood is an acquired preference though; it's fragrance is both herbal and slightly stuffy, an instant reminder of English maze gardens.
Now that you have identified the base ingredient for your fragrance garden, feature it as the focal point to your garden. Put the plants right in the center in abundance; or edge your driveway with them; or if all you have is a deck, arrange them in tall tubs in the center of the deck and place the other plants around the perimeter so that their fragrances can easily mingle.
Where you put the plants is nearly as important as which plants you choose, because if they are hidden, or their scents waft downwind and away from your house, their scents will be wasted -- lost forever to your neighbors. Use the main plant feature in a strategic place, and then carefully place the "mixture" fragrances around it, or at least within range of the direction of the breezes.
For example, my own deck faces southwest, and a strong wind sweeps around the house from north to west, around from right to left and off into the woods. I choose to trap the wind and force the warm convection to bring out the oils in the flowers and leaves. How? I planted a stiff line of rosa eglanteria, the "apple-scented rose" whose leaves smell like fresh green apples in rain, heat, and wind. The eglanteria is right next to the glass doors and forms one arch up the wall and over the doors, and another arch along the shorter length of the (rectangular) deck.
At the adjacent corner is a large tub planting of a huge old bourbon rose, Madame Isaac Periäre, and her long canes wrap around the entire corner and extend almost half the length of the deck (which is 22' long). Eglanteria's branches stop the wind, and the scented leaves give off a very pleasant sweet smell; when Periäre is in bloom she is covered with literally hundreds of rose madder blooms, each having at least a hundred petals, and each blossom absolutely *stinks* of sweet rosey raspberries. The combination of fragrances is blown into the house through the screened glass doors; it is both heady and beautiful.
Think of the possibilities! You can use this strategy on a line of scented basils with lemon verbena, lavender bushes with mignonette and stocks, or if you like the scent of cloves all summer, try rugosa rose bushes which will also reward you with bright orange hips in the fall. Line your driveway, plant under a main window, or heap in tubs, on your deck.
Think of the moonlight, and the plants that perfume the night air, too. Nicotiana alata for example, opens her long trumpets in the early evening and releases her fragrance to the the many moths attracted by the gleaming white flowers. Plants such as this stately annual belong beneath an open window, or along a walkway that you favor in the twilight hours. We have planted Nicotiana along the north side of the house, under the livingroom windows. The fragrance mixes with the mossy scent of the woods; and the scent is there in the morning, lingering on even during the worst dog days of summer. Dianthus ("pinks") are especially fragrant at night, with the white-flowering varieties being the sweetest and strongest-smelling of all.
So far, you have been thinking about main odors, prevailing winds and mixed fragrances, and guests wishing to touch the fragrant sources. Let's not forget about another very important rule: containers. Containers can be carried anywhere you wish to mix a particular scent! They are portable, and so becomes your fragrance garden. Move them around, and feature one as a focal point. Raised containers or high planters encourage touch, and also bring the fragrance closer to the curious nose.
I have tried a number of combinations with raised tubs, and the least rewarding was a high white pedestal type containing a low mat of dianthus "Tiny Rubies." The "rubies" did *not* bloom all summer as advertised, and quickly became a boring fixture. I ripped out the dianthus and filled the tub with "Sans Souci" lilies ringed with nepeta catmint; the pink freckled lilies flutter atop a mass of fragrant blue blooms for the better part of a month, filling a wide area with the heady perfume of the Nile. When the show is over, I drag the tub from the center of attention to a far corner, leave the blue-blooming nepeta, and fill the center with a tall salvia ("Lady In Red," multi-tiered glowing rose-red spires), essentially giving it to the hummingbirds for the rest of the summer.
I experimented one summer with a camomile lawn rather than a grass lawn. Camomile has been used for centuries as lawn material -- it is beautifully fragrant, doesn't require mowing, and revels in being walked and stomped upon. In fact, the more you roll and smash it into the ground, the more it takes root and flourishes. I have since added camomile to various tubs and planters because when it is planted around the edge of a tub, it will hang over and down most gracefully, and the little yellow mid-summer flowers float sweetly in the breeze. And, now that the camomile is in higher places, I am more tempted to snip the flowers to make tea or hair rinses, which is yet another benefit of a fragrance garden.
But the camomile example is more than that, it is a ground cover, and that is our final rule for fragrance: put fragrant plants underfoot so that your walking stirs the air while releasing the smell. Other favorite ground covers for this purpose are the very low mints such as mentha corsica (the very strongest peppermint-smelling mint), various thymes such as lemon thyme or mother-of-thyme, camomile of course, which smells of apples, and oregano, which doesn't like to be walked on *too* much but will withstand some abuse if you're careful to not break any woody stems.
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Favorite sources for fragrant plants (and seeds):
- Shepherd's Garden Seeds, Torrington, CT (203) 482-3638
- White Flower Farm, Litchfield, CT (203) 496-9600
- Nicholls Nursery, Albany, OR (503) 928-9280
- The Antique Rose Emporium, Brenham, TX 1-800-441-0002
- Park's Seed Co, Cokesbury Road, Greenwood, SC 29647
- Wayside Gardens, Hodges, SC 1-800-845-1124
Books to read:
- "Landscaping with Herbs" by James Adams, Timber Press, 1987.
- "Geraniums for Home and Garden" by Helen Krauss, MacMillan, 1955.
- "The City Gardener's Handbook" by Linda Yang, Random House, 1990.
- "The Scented Garden" by Rosemary Verey, Marshall Editions, 1981,
- published in the U.S. by Random House
NOTE: If you would like more detailed addresses, or a more thorough (and less discriminating) list of suppliers and books, please do not hesitate to ask!
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Copyright (c) 1993 Lucia B. Chambers
Pelargonium v. crispum varieties are the bulk of the lemon-scented plants and their leaf texture is notably "crisped," the plant, pyramidical. Pelargonium v. odoratissimum (the apple-scented) has flat leaves that feel like cool silk and the plants bush low and drape down like fuchsias; they make good hanging container plants. Scented geranium leaves are very pungent and contain enough essential oils that the perfume industry uses rose-scented geranium leaves more often than rose petals for expensive perfume extracts and oils. Their flowers, however, are not extraordinary. P. odoratissimum produces little white summer flowers, and the other varieties make small violet or pink single "geranium" flowers on and off through the year.
