Three hybrid musk Buff Beauty roses are sitting in the "bud vase" on my desk as I write this, scenting the entire room. If you don't have a hybrid musk rose, or a strongly scented one like Peace, Papa Meilland or My Lincoln, purchase one now. Or stroll around your suburb later, stickybeaking - or rather "sticky nosing" - until you locate the scent. Then you can ask for a pruned "cutting" next winter, and have it for free.
If you can't smell a rose from the footpath, it's not the one you want.
Those three roses withered days ago but their scent is so wonderful I can't bear to throw them out until I wander outside after work and pick some more. No artificial scent or spray comes anywhere near the clarity and subtleness of a scent straight from the plant.
A home's odour is gradually built up. Ours is a mix of peanut sauce from last night's dinner, decades of choc-chip biscuits, fresh flowers, dried but still fragrant flowers that I toss into a bowl of what's usually called pot pouri, but isn't - real pot pouri is slightly fermented and takes about a year or even more to make. The hint of wombat is entirely hidden by the power of three roses.
Tiny gardens can transform a home. One potted hybrid musk, fed, watered and most of all, picked to encourage new blooms to form, will gift you blooms from October until early June. Add a scented camellia, a few hardy Earlicheer daffodils and a daphne, potted or in the ground, and you have a year of scents.
The African violet that a friend gave me blooms every day. They grow from a leaf cutting. Put the stem in soil, keep it moist, and you'll have an African violet plant.
Think bonsai if you want elegance and a miniature landscape to meditate on, but forget it if you don't know how to care for that particular bonsai. Many of the easily obtained species need outside light, even though they've been displayed for sale inside. We have a hardy one that was a gift and flourishes indoors, with a label that carefully didn't say what species it is (I suspect it might become a weed outside). The "tree" has spread its roots around a tall rock and stays lavishly green and gorgeous with a weekly watering. It needs less care than a fish fern.
Geraniums (Pelargonium spp) are the true tiny garden heroes. Every ramshackle camp of huts made from old crates or sheets of plastic or crowded slum around the world seems to have at least one dwelling with a row of bright red geraniums blooming in old tin cans.
This is the time to bung a big pot of basil on your kitchen windowsill: fresh-picked tastes better. Hang a basket of curly mint just outside the kitchen window where you can water it with the leftovers from the coffee pot, which will feed it too. Fill a mug with water and stuff some flowers in it, or even just some gum leaves, and place them where you'll work or relax today, small symbols of our planet's generosity.
This week my garden needs:
- Mowing. Sadly I can no longer pretend the wallabies and wombats are going to munch up all the grass;
- Tomatoes! And basil, coloured Swiss chard, cucumbers, zucchini and lettuces. Frosts may still be lurking, but it's time to take the chance....
- Eating. Our semi-dwarf mulberry tree is finally giving us a few dozen ripe fruit every day from its ludicrously heavy crop of berries, and the Atherton native raspberries giving a lavish crop. My purple "kale" has just given birth to a giant purple cauliflower, despite my picking its leaves all winter;
- Wandering, sniffing the musk roses, admiring the rambling Albertine, the purple bottlebrush, the weigela and all the beauty of late spring;
- Watering: the soil between the grass roots is turning to dust; and
- Solving the annual puzzle: if the birds are going to eat two-thirds of the cherries, how many will that leave for us?
