Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant to be a kind space, so please try not to give or take offense, and let’s all agree to disagree when opinions differ. In fragrance as in life, your mileage may vary! YMMV.
Today is Friday, June 12.
We’ve had tons of rain this week, including some torrential downpours, but yesterday the skies cleared and today dawned with blue skies, not a cloud in sight, and lots of sunshine. My garden is very happy! Speaking of my garden, I posted briefly on my other blog, “Old Herbaceous“, where I write about gardening, about an article in The New York Times about incorporating scent and fragrance into gardens, even if only in container gardening. It’s called “The Invisible Garden of Scent”, and you can link to it here.
What are your favorite scents in a garden? Or do you avoid scented plants?
Serenity Now Scents and Sensibilities 
My other half’s indoor herb “garden” has produced a lot of dill, and I was surprised to catch whiffs of what smelled like an aromachemical (not sure which, one of the milder ones) when I walked past it. Wish we had some lemon thyme again – so delicious!
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I’ve never grown dill, which is odd because I like the flavor and its looks. I may have to try,
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It also springs flowers that look like fireworks, which I’d never seen!
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I like the smell of rosemary or lavender in my garden. And I love to sniff the leaves of my small fig tree. And the peonies too.
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I do love rosemary! In my garden and my food. I’ve never succeeded with lavender, though, much as I like it.
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My roses smell beautiful, so does the honeysuckle in the evening.
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Those are wonderful flowers in a summer garden!
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You know I love roses! The only honeysuckle in my garden is a self-sown wild one and it doesn’t seem to be very fragrant. Pretty, though.
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I am about to plant a lemon thyme in the flower box on my balcony, mostly to smell when I’m sitting there! I also love the smell of bird cherry in spring because it brings back memories from childhood. A large part of my childhood was spent in a town north of the Arctic Circle, so roses and other scented flowers came in the middle of summer. Living much further south now, I have had lavender and rosemary in pots on the balcony some years, and it is great, but I have so far never managed to keep lavender alive over winter.
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Lemon thyme will be wonderful! I’ve struggled with lavender too. What is bird cherry?
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Bird cherry is a tree with clusters of white small flowers and they have a pleasant smell.
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For the life of me I cannot grow anything, even when I try. In my defense, I think the small patch of soil that I have around the patio is extremely poor in nutrients, and there’s almost never any sun there. But still…
Scents that I would love to have there: Daphne Odora for winter (I killed the second plant this year 😦 ); lilac and mimosa for spring and linden, roses and peonies for summer.
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Daphne odora is wonderful! But they’re very finicky plants, I’ve lost two although they grew happily for several years each. There are some shade tolerant evergreen vines you could grow in pots with trellises, which have very fragrant flowers, like star jasmine and clematis Armandii.
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Hey OH,
Fabulous question. We had a large suburban garden at the house. There were a couple of produce sections when we were kids. There was always something exciting to pick, eat, smell or look at throughout the year. My very favourites were tearing orange tree leaves, marigolds, nasturtium leaves, roses, the jasmine over the fence and all the different herbs. By the front tap Mum grew an enormous Daphne, it came to my waist, every time it flowered my bedroom would smell fabulous.
Another thing I loved was when it rained after a dry spell the eucalypts would let off the most extravagant scent, It was overwhelming. Especially if we were in the salt water pool, to come up from underwater you would breathe in this extraordinary mentholated air.
We tried lavender a few times and it never fared well.
Portia xx
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I’ve never had luck with lavender, I think my climate is too humid for it to thrive. Daphne is such a wonderful scent!
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I don’t have many flowers in my garden, but have fragrant honeysuckle, a lilac tree that’s at the edge of the driveway and throws out its scent, and a broom that I’d love in a perfume. I wish I had my mother’s green fingers but alas, no.
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Those are all beautiful scents. Broom is not very common in fragrance, is it? I was interested to see that it’s a note in Zoologist Bee, but it doesn’t seem to be dominant. It’s in Ormonde Jayne’s Ta’if, but again, not dominant. The only fragrance I’ve found that seems to feature it as the dominant note is Alkemia’s Wild Atlantic Way (which sounds gorgeous, btw). I haven’t tried any Alkemia fragrances, have you?
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Ooh, I’m going to check that one out. I haven’t even heard of Alkemia fragrances. Off to do some homework 😉
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