Sensory Gardens

After the dishes were done this evening, I sat on the back porch for a while in the sweet evening. Precious, the family Shih Tzu, lay still, as she rarely does, on my lap. In a little, I thought, it's still light, and it's cool, I think I'll plant the basil. Last winter after frost I had cut the dry seed stalks from our sweet basil plants, beaten them to crumbs, and hung them in a paper grocery bag in the tool shed until planting time. This evening was it. I hoed and raked the bed, maybe ten by three, the scarcely shaded spot between a towering dill plant (which breathed on me in the breeze) and the new irises we set out last fall. Then I tore open the bag, plunged my right hand to the bottom of the fragrant chaff, pulled up handfuls of dusty husks, stems, and tiny flat black seeds, and scattered them over the ground. In the morning, on my twice-weekly watering day, I'll water the seed in. Basil is the herb that gives pizza sauce its sweet tang; oregano is the darker, sagier flavor.

The scent gave me such pleasure that when I came in, I called my friend who loves to cook -- would she like some mint? some rosemary? maybe some thyme? All these are perennial in my garden. Just to walk down the gravel path between the beds defined by crumbling boards is a joy to the sense of smell. In the morning when I go out to water, I will cut some for her.

The trouble with writing about scents is that I want to name the plant and expect the reader to remember the scent. Mint is familiar, but what about thyme? My Shakespeare friends will tell you that rosemary is for remembrance (alas, Ophelia), but I understand why when I walk by the rosemary bush and hours later can smell its pungent piney warmth on my clothing. I've heard that scents are most closely tied to the memory. Maybe it's because they are so hard to put into words.

My favorite remembrance of rosemary is from visiting the Pepperdine campus in summer one year when the rosemary, carpeting the Malibu campus hills with its dark needles, was covered with small light-blue flowers. When the breeze blew in from the ocean, waves of scent flowed into our rooms.

The young man who mows my lawn likes for me to tell him about my plants. I showed him the dill plant, just coming into bloom, waist high, with a stalk a big around as a mop handle, but infinitely frilly, and crowned with firework heads of yellow. "That's dill," I said, "like pickles." "Can I try it?" "Sure!" He pinched off a tiny bit and nibbled it: "Dill!" It's one thing to hear the word, another to recognize the flavor, the scent.

I brought from Memphis a packet of seeds of the night-blooming giant white "morning" glory we call Moon Vine. It blooms saucer-sized pure white trumpets in the dark, flooding the night with a heavy sweet scent. Today two of the seeds are up. I made sure to plant them away from other things and near the back fence, for they're morning glories, after all, and will run everywhere. (In Memphis they tried to pry between my wrought iron porch support and the fascia, and almost won.)

Gardens should be planted for their scent as well as for their color. Twice I have seen that judgment made public in "Sensory Gardens" -- at the botanical garden in St. Louis, and at the botanical garden in Memphis. Both gardens have waist-high planters, with sturdy wheel-chair-accessible concrete walks between. Planted then at the height that someone could reach naturally even if seated, and marked with signs in Braille as well as print, the garden beds contain fragrant plants and plants with interesting textures to touch. The Memphis garden has a koi pool with a fountain that chuckles and splatters. Early there is sweet Carolina jasmine on an overhead bower, drizzling its sunny scent down; and hyacinths, smelling purple and powdery, like an elderly aunt's bath powder. In midsummer, geraniums of the ordinary kind, and lemon geraniums, bitter rue, and sweet balms, and marigolds, with their astringent announcements.

In my own garden, even though I have to stoop to touch it, I have a Santolina, or lavendar cotton. Its close-beaded fronds are knotted like hundreds of little fists in a row, each clutching a few molecules of water. It is putting up a foot-high carpet of fuzzy yellow buttons on tall stalks, like tiny daisies without petals. When it rains, the Santolina gives off a bitter sagey tang. Its mound creeps year by year, taking over a few more inches of garden and rooting down where it touches the ground.

Two years ago my rosemary froze - I had trimmed it too late in the season and it was too exposed to the north wind - but a sprig that had rooted survived and will by the end of this season be almost as large as its parent was. It will be large enough to brush against me when I walk by on the path.

The gardener who built these garden paths in my yard was my cousin's husband; he is dead now, too early in life, but I remember him well. One of the ironies is that he lost his sense of smell in early adulthood. Intermittently it would return and he would be so overwhelmed by odors that he would have constant headaches.

I don't think that my awareness of fragrances is particularly subtle; there are many humans whose sense of smell is better than mine, and most of the animals, certainly. So what I enjoy is only part of what is there. What any of us enjoy is only some of what is available, but it is all given anyway, whether a sunset unnoticed, or stars wheeling over while we are asleep, or invisible frequencies of light, or an undiscovered glacier, or the fragrance in the night that spills from a tub of petunias for its moth admirers, or the unheard songs of the angelic host.