Scent, stillness and the garden

As I’ve been ordering the final seeds for 2026, I noticed my attention lingering on one thing in particular: scent.

While choosing varieties of Nicotiana, I wasn’t thinking about how the plants would look, but about how they would smell. That soft fragrance that drifts through the garden on a warm summer evening, almost unnoticed at first, until it draws you in. And it made me realise how much of what I grow is guided not by colour or form, but by fragrance.

The narcissi are already pushing up through the soil, quietly holding the promise of their scent. In the greenhouse, sweet peas and stocks are growing on, and when I tend them my thoughts aren’t on height or timing, but on the moment their perfume will finally fill the air. So much of gardening lives in anticipation, and scent is often what we imagine first.

Of all the senses, scent feels like the one most closely tied to presence. To stop and smell a flower is to pause completely. Taking a bloom in your hand, lowering your head and breathing in naturally slows everything down. For a moment, your attention rests exactly where you are, rather than where you need to be next.

One of my favourite experiences in the garden is wandering through the flowers on a summer evening, the air heavy with the scent of Nicotiana. It’s a time when the day begins to soften, when the garden feels fuller somehow, and when simply being there is enough.

If you’d like to introduce more fragrance into your own garden, these are some of my favourite plants to grow for scent:

• Sweet peas

• Scented stocks

• Nicotiana

• Perennial phlox

• Scented narcissi

• Hesperis (sweet rocket)

  
  

Planting scented flowers close to the house means you notice them more often — by a back door, along a path, or near somewhere you sit. Night-scented varieties such as Nicotiana and night-scented stocks are especially rewarding, releasing their fragrance just as the day slows. Coming home in the evening to that scent drifting from a pot by the door feels like a quiet kind of welcome.

Herbs offer another way to experience scent in the garden. Walking through and gently crushing leaves between your fingers invites a different kind of attention. Lavender, rosemary, perennial fennel, apple mint, lemon balm and dill are some of my favourites, plants that ask very little, yet give so much back.

A moment with a flower

A simple practice I return to often is this: begin with the scent. Lift a flower and breathe it in slowly, noticing how the fragrance unfolds, soft or aromatic, fleeting or lingering. Then let your attention move to the flower itself. Notice the curve of each petal, the fine veins, the way light rests on its surface. In attending to these small details, the wider world falls away for a moment, and you find yourself fully present, held in the quiet wonder of the natural world.

Sometimes, that is all the garden asks of us.