IntroductionA garden can benefit and enrich your life in so many unexpected ways. As an extension of your living space, a garden can be a quiet place to relax with a book or a place to gather and celebrate with friends. A garden can do more than just look pretty. It can be a place of solace, joy, beauty, and rejuvenation. Including scented plants in your garden creates a sense of magic and wonder, as their fragrances evoke memories, lift your spirits, soothe your nerves, surprise and delight visitors, and elevate your garden to a place of heavenly bliss.
If you are passionate about gardening, you know that it is a labor of love, and you know that the time and energy you put into gardening will reward you in many ways. Creating and maintaining a fragrant garden requires no more time or effort than that of any other garden, but the bounty and blessings are multiplied, resulting in a landscape that is both beautiful and wondrously fragrant. When you bring your flower harvests indoors, you are further rewarded with fragrance and beauty inside your home.
Chapters one and two explore the world of scented plants that can enhance both your garden and your home. You can experience one of the greatest joys of a fragrant flower garden by bringing the flowers’ intoxicating scents indoors. Whether you’re creating gorgeous floral arrangements or making all-natural beauty products, fragrant plants can enhance your life and embellish your living space in many ways. In chapters three and four, you’ll learn about ways to use your scented bounty to enrich your home through garden-grown arrangements, herbal hydrosol, natural perfumes, flower tinctures, potpourri, and so much more.
One of the added benefits of creating beauty products from the garden is that they are healthy, both for the environment and for your body. Many commercially available scented products and perfumes are created from synthetic chemicals. You can create homemade perfumes and scented beauty and home products directly from the natural raw materials growing in your own garden, without the chemicals!
How to Use This BookThis book includes many plants that can be grown in all USDA hardiness zones (see page 37), but it is not a fragrant plant encyclopedia. The goal of this book is to help you learn about how to grow and engage with fragrance and then seek out more plants that grow in your region to include in your garden.
One of the best places to start is at your local botanical garden or independent plant nursery, where you can talk to knowledgeable staff about fragrant plants. You can also get to know the fragrant plants that flourish in your part of the world by taking time to “stop and smell the roses.” As you encounter a fragrant flower in a garden or nursery, lean over the flower, cup your hands around your nose and mouth, and inhale. To experience a plant’s fragrant foliage, reach out and gently rub the plant’s leaf. Doing this will release the plant’s scent into the air and probably onto your hand.
It’s hard to describe scent. Adjectives are often used that tell you nothing about what a plant smells like. Words like “lovely,” “pleasant,” “scented,” and “intoxicating” tell you nothing except that a plant is, well, lovely. In this book, we make comparisons to familiar scents to describe a plant’s fragrance. For example, Sarcococca (sweet box) smells like vanilla (which is lovely in the winter when it blooms). But sometimes the descriptive word is simply the plant’s name. For us, rosemary smells like rosemary. It is a highlight of our California winter gardens when the plant is in bloom, and it’s the backdrop of the hot summer days when we tend to the garden daily. Rosemary’s scent is consistent and grounding. But that does not tell you what the plant smells like, but rather the emotional experience attached to the scent. Keep in mind that scent is subjective, emotive, and personal. It’s okay if you do not agree with our description of a plant’s fragrance, but we hope that you agree that these plants are worth seeking out and including in your garden space.
The gardens shared in this book are designed, installed, and maintained by Stefani’s company, Homestead Design Collective. The folks in the garden photos included here are not models, but part of our garden community at Homestead and our families. They are real gardeners in the real gardens that we have created. Many of the beautiful arrangements and all of the beauty products in the book were created by Alethea, who owns Studio Choo, a boutique floral design studio. She is the coauthor (with Jill Rizzo) of
The Flower Recipe Book and
The Wreath Recipe Book, and she is a perfumer. Also included are arrangements created by our friend Juliette Surnamer, a Los Angeles–based florist. We have been so lucky to work with photographer David Fenton on this book and both of Stefani’s other books (
The Beautiful Edible Garden and
Harvest). In this book, David’s photography beautifully captures the emotive experience of the fragrant flower garden.
A garden can be a constant source of aromatic inspiration, both indoors and out. The good news is that all it takes is getting to know fragrant flowers and plants and incorporating them in your garden. We hope you enjoy the journey of transforming your garden into one of both beauty and enchanting fragrance. We are excited to share our expertise in gardening, floristry, and perfumery with you.
Copyright © 2024 by Stefani Bittner and Alethea Harampolis. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
