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Sally Nex

~ Sustainable food growing

Sally Nex

Tag Archives: pot pourri

Gardening in smellovision

14 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by sallynex in garden design

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

herbs, perfume, pot pourri, roses, scent, scent in the garden, scented-leaved pelargoniums

scent_geranium

Scented leaf geraniums: only perfumed when crushed

I am having a bit of a dilemma.

I’m in the middle of that bit of the year in which I realise (and this happens every single year) that my ambitions are slightly outstripping my ability to turn them into reality.

It’s all going quite well in the workaday veg garden bit: an impending deadline helped get the potager-style fruit garden finished (it remains the only ‘finished’ or even ‘started’ area of my garden), and now I’m in the middle of extending and redesigning the veg-growing bit to look, I hope, the way I’d always dreamed it would.

But there’s an area around where we usually have barbecues which is currently a bit of a weed-strangled jungle, bar the half of it I keep cultivated mainly in order to grow those plants I acquire at random: they’re quite nice, but not exactly coherent at the moment.

This is what I call my ‘pot pourri’ garden. Not because it’s a mishmash, though in its current state you’d be forgiven for thinking that; more because I decided in my initial plan that I’d grow all the ingredients I’d need to make my own pot-pourri there. This, I reasoned, would mean lots of lovely scented things and would also mean I could have fun experimenting with making my own ground orris root and such like.

winterhoneysuckle

Winter honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima)

It’s quite a large area: and a good thing too, as my list of pot pourri ingredients is increasing the more I look into this. A few Apothecary’s roses, some Iris germanica (that’s the orris root), lavender, rosemary and sweet marjoram; oodles of bergamot, chamomile and clove carnations; big boys like eucalyptus (coppiced), jasmine and honeysuckle; and little beauties like mignonette, violets, scented-leaved geraniums and tansy.

But my dilemma is with the scent. Or rather, scents: doesn’t the bergamot clash with the roses? And if you’ve got honeysuckle pumping out the perfume, doesn’t it rather interfere with the sweetness of eau de jasmine?

You can, of course, pace your scented plants so they’re not all performing at once. The spiciness of a wallflower is over well before the richness of roses pervades the air; essential oils of sage and rosemary are released only on a hot summer’s day, so shouldn’t interfere with the more delicate spring scent of violets. And some, like honeysuckle and nicotiana, only rev up when the sun goes down, considerately leaving daytime hours to roses and carnations.

But what happens when you’ve got a powerful scent near a scent that’s delicate? Or – possibly worse – two powerful scents at once?

Then you get clashing scents, or a jumble of scents which are indistinguishable one from the other – and I’m not sure I like the sound of that.

There’s very little written about this particular consideration when you’re gardening with scent: on the whole, the advice seems to be, pack in as much of it as you possibly can. Even the trustiest books in my gardening library are no help here: they go on about not forgetting to include the ‘extra’ element of scent, but forget to tell us how.

Viburnum x bodnantense 'Dawn'

Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’

In my experience there are different scent effects for each scented plant (and I’m not just talking about the type of perfume). Some scents fill a garden when they’re at full throttle: the kind you walk out into your garden one day and think, ‘What is that?’ Christmas box, most of the daphnes, philadelphus on a sunny day and climbers like honeysuckle and jasmine do that for me.

Others stay put, occupying the small area around the particular shrub or plant so you only really experience it when you’re right next to it. Roses, mignonette, wallflowers and my lovely stately Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’.

Then there’s a third category: the ones you have to crush a leaf, or tread on, or otherwise damage for its occasional – and usually powerful – puff of fragrance. This includes most of the scented-foliage plants: herbs such as lemon verbena, lemonbalm, chamomile, bergamot, eucalyptus and scented-leaf geraniums.

So I’m going to work on that basis. The strong scents I shall use with caution: I’ll think hard whether I want them at all (jasmine in particular is a real thug when it gets going) and spread them out where I can: winter honeysuckle not summer, perhaps.

I shall make sure I don’t plant any of the second category next to any from the first. And the third lot I think I can probably get away with sprinkling with gay abandon through the whole thing.

But since I’ve never tried planting a garden based on scent before, I may be entirely wrong. This, I have a feeling, may turn out to be something of an experiment, as all the best gardening tends to be. Let’s hope it doesn’t end in a terminal case of olfactory overload.

The Grand Tour #3: The Shady Bit

08 Monday Nov 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

astrantia, geraniums, holly, meconopsis, new gardens, pot pourri, scented plants

Turn your back to the house once again, and look to your left: this is the side of the garden that lies in the lee of a steeply-sloping bank, topped with a hedge, the lane meandering by on the other side a good ten feet or so above head height. The ‘lawn’ stretches back from here, but in front is a little seating area: no good for chilly autumn or spring, when you require the full force of the sun, but wonderful in summer, I suspect, where the shade will be a welcome respite from all those 40°-plus temperatures we’re supposed to be getting in a few years’ time.

I introduce you to….

The Pot-Pourri Garden

It’s not quite in full shade: the bit that wraps around to the garden path, to the right in this picture, actually gets sun for most of the day. It is for this reason that I’ve decided this should be the place for another long-held hankering of mine: a garden where all the plants can be used for pot-pourri. This idea may be fairly heftily modified in the coming months: it’s quite likely, for example, that apothecary’s rose (Rosa gallica var officinalis), a base ingredient for pot-pourri and one of my all-time favourite roses for its sumptuous, unforgettable scent, will not like my chalky soil here. But in the best gardening traditions I shall try, and probably err, until I get it right. At worst, I should end up with rather a nice scented garden: even nicer on those summer evenings.

For now, however, it is a sea of neglect: there has obviously at some stage in its dim and distant past been some love and attention, as there are some rather gorgeous things here such as a massive and beautiful clump of bronze rodgersia. But mostly, it’s just a sea of cranesbill: and not even interesting cranesbill but the rampant wild form, which although pretty is a little tedious in these quantities.

There are other self-seeding lovelies, though, like this Meconopsis cambrica: a slender, delicate, tissue-paper-thin poppy of just the perfect shade of yellow which I have always struggled to grow elsewhere, yet here is growing itself. Perfect.

And astrantias are clearly happy too: it’s just the common-or-garden kind rather than one of the more vividly-coloured selections, but nonetheless lovely for that.

And this rather handsome yellow-leaved shrub is glowing in the gloom: but I have no idea what it is. It’s 4-5ft tall and hasn’t done anything other than this, so far. I do like those deep purple stems, though. It is ringing a bell, I know I’ve seen it before somewhere and I probably ought to know its identity – but my poor overloaded mind is so far drawing a blank. Any ideas, anyone?

At the back is a fine variegated holly – it’s right next to the Ginkgo I mentioned in a previous rambling, and the contrast between the Ginkgo’s yellow autumn foliage and the yellow-and-green variegation of the holly is inspired. And it looks like we’ll have holly berries for Christmas for the first time ever this year.

But what of the bank? I hear you say. There must, surely, be a bank?

Ah yes, but it is a gentle one: horribly overgrown and scrubby, but very sheltered and rather nook-like. I am seeing daphnes, violets, wintersweet and other lovely things tumbling over each other on the way down.

Home-made perfume

11 Monday Jun 2007

Posted by sallynex in cutting garden

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dried flowers, pot pourri, Rosa gallica officinalis

One of the sidelines of my cutting garden is left over from its previous incarnation as a herb garden: I’ve got a row of plants specifically dedicated to producing perfume.

At the moment – since the whole thing got interrupted so wasn’t completed properly – it consists only of English lavender and Apothecary’s Rose (Rosa gallica officinalis). The rose is currently flowering its head off and so I’m gathering the petals and drying them on a shelf in the shady corridor that runs from one back door to the other, between my office and the kitchen. It might sound like an odd place for drying flowers, but in fact it fulfils all the main requirements in that it’s shady, cool and there’s a draught running through it regularly.

At the moment I’m not quite sure what I shall do with the dried petals: I could make simple rose-petal pot pourri, which just means dried rose petals in a bowl. That would be nice, but I’m not sure how long it will last. What I’d really like to do is to make wet pot pourri – the type for which it is named (it literally means “rotten pot”!). This involves packing layers of petals which have been dried for just two days in a big crock with rock salt. Unfortunately since the pot needs to be clay or similar (i.e. not see-through) I’ve got a problem sourcing one – large glass jars are relatively easy to find, but big clay crocks went out with my grandma. The search begins!

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