A Luridly Scented Garden

Last week, we had three days of 90-some degrees. That seems to have signaled the flowers to pop out. They're all out now, blooming aggressively even though the temperatures went back to 50s and 60s. The scent from so many different blooms wafts around outside.

The earliest to bloom was the pink jasmine (Jasminium polyanthum). I finally got it to wrap around the 10-foot tall Salet rose. The effect isn't very obvious yet, but lovely. The Daphne Marginata was just fabulous -- such a wonderful plant! My single hyacinthe bloomed faithfully but after it faded, I forgot its location and stupidly dug up what I thought was an unusually stubborn clump of defiantly gripping crab grass.

The biggest contributor to the scent right now is the Wisteria. I have a love-hate relationship with that plant. It's beautiful, has a lovely scent, is prolific and carefree, and has an Asian heritage, like me, but it's so vigorous that it's strangling the two trees on either side of it. I should have pruned it way back last winter.

The second biggest scent contributor isn't blooming yet -- the Star Jasmine. It's a huge, vigorous plant that many people use for ground cover. I hate using the hedge trimmer on it because it oozes a white sticky milk when it's cut.

I'm surprised the various blooming citrus isn't pumping out fragrance. Lemon, grapefruit, lime, kumquat. Maybe their scent is being overpowered by the other flowers?

A really great, natural nummingbird feeder is honeysuckle (Lonicera). It can be invasive so make sure it's contained and well trimmed.

The classic and English roses are blending their various scents. The Salet with its musky scent is one of the most satisfying roses to have in the garden. The Eglantyne is very, very sweet. The musk rose is just getting started. The Baronne de Prevost is putting out 4" blooms and grew a foot in height last month! The Graham Thomas smells citus-y. My beloved pampered pet, Evelyn, doesn't even have buds yet but has a sucker. The two-tone Peace hybrid has the typical tea rose scent and is blooming very well. The pure Peace, I think should be removed -- it has some kind of fungal infestation. I'll put tuberose corms in that pot.

I'm anxious for the gardenia to bloom -- it should smell great. It seems to be late this year. Thank goodness the Kahili ginger is way in the furthest corner by itself. I don't like its scent although its sheer size is impressive. I would love the scent of the butterfly ginger (Hedychium Coronaria), but it has never bloomed for me, despite lavish applications of fertilizer, compost, manure.

When it stays warm, the French and English lavender and two types of rosemary will dominate the garden's scent. The Stephanotis did well last summer, but was not the powerful scent that I was hoping for. Maybe it likes real tropical temperatures, consistently high 80s and low 90s?

The scented geraniums (real pelagonium, Rose of Attar and Citronella) are blooming but they don't put out scent -- you have to crush the leaves to release the oil. Ditto for the spearmint.

Yard Cleanup

This isn't going to be one of those 'happy happy' posts about everything blooming. It's about yard work.

It's so satisfying to cut off big, big, I mean BIG branches, and pull up 3 foot high weeds. Who knew that all those English roses that I didn't prune in January are actually climbers? Took a deep breath and cut a 5-foot long, half inch diameter cane from the Eglantyne rose (pink flower in the picture, very vigorous and fragrant!). That leaves another 6 feet of that cane. The Salet (dark red rose in picture) is being interwined by pink jasmine (jasminum polyanthum) which was what I wanted, but the star jasmine in front has grabbed branches and is throttling them! It took some patience to cut the rose free.

Then there are the mistakes from my ignorant gardener days. I didn't know that the Japanese Anemone Queen Charlotte is invasive! In addition to springing up everywhere, the spent blooms dry on long, ugly brown stalks and must be pulled out by hand. Maybe defoliant will eradicate it without hurting the tender air roots of the camellia that it's near? Speaking of invasive, I sneered at the asparagus fern ibeing sold for money. How do I get rid of the ones progressing across my yard? They have their own underground nutrition nodes so they're hard to kill.

Alas, there's that oramental tree in the center of the yard whose roots sprout branches. It has infiltrated a hedge (hard to saw off saplings that are inside the hedge), lifted a stepping stone on the main path, and appears among the ground cover. Is it possible that one small tree can propagate a whole forest of itself?