HOW often have we heard gardening described as therapeutic? For some it offers a place of retreat and contemplation; others revel in the physical exertion of mowing and weeding and trimming. Yet there is a further benefit you may be missing out on which we might call aromatherapy gardening.
As well as providing a joy to the eye, a garden filled with a blend of subtle and sumptuous scents from plants such as honeysuckle, lilies, roses and herbs can calm a troubled mind.
Lilies, which you can buy in bud from the garden centre, offer a range of scents from the sweet turkscap blooms of the speciosum types or the intoxication of the auratum types such as Casa Blanca, which grows to about 3ft tall and has the largest blooms with wide open funnels.
If they are in a pot you can bring them indoors, but you may find them a little overpowering.
Lilies flower from June to September, and if you set the bulbs six inches apart in groups of three or six and leave them undisturbed they will multiply over the years. Some of the best fragrant lilies are African Queen (apricot), Candidum (white), Journey's End (crimson), Regale (white), Speciosum Rubrum Magnificum (carmine) and Royal Gold (yellow).
Roses perhaps bring more sheer pleasure around the world than any other plant, and the cabbage rose, damask rose and moss rose have also been used in medicine and cooking. Most old-fashioned roses have a rich fragrance, along with rose rugosa and its many lovely hybrids. Sweet briar has leaves that release their scent after rain, and Penzance hybrids are a joy.
Old roses flower once a year but modern roses such as Constance Fry, Ellen and Graham Thomas are prolific as well as highly fragrant. Honeysuckle is a must for the scented garden. From July to September the evergreen Japanese honeysuckle will scent the air for yards around, as will our native Lonicera periclymenum, and its varieties.
Patios, steps and walls can be filled with pots of fragrant geraniums such as the rose geranium, the apple geranium and the balsam-scented pelargonium quercifolium.
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