I’ve always had a relationship with scent. Initially it was as a kid with my parents making their cosmetics at home - surrounded by herbs, essential oils and flowers.

Then, as I started to train in perfumery I deepened my understanding of the world of perfume. Travelling to see roses picked at dawn in Turkey or Jasmine blossoms transformed into liquid scent in Egypt. As these experiences informed how I made fragrance I naturally started to become interested in the wider impacts of both the ingredients on their surrounding ecosystems and, in why nature smells. 

All of this helped in the initial forming of the design for Careys Secret Garden. It wasn’t so much that the garden was a specific ‘perfume garden’, more that scent was built in to the experience as much as any other element of garden design should do, something which has become all too unusual these days. 

Now we have a rose wheel burgeoning with scented blossoms of all types, some lemon-like, others powdery dry, and some a rich floral tapestry. We have scented salvias, pelargoniums, citrus, herbs and more that all tell a story of smell around the garden. 

However, as I’ve spent time here I’ve noticed that we have all too often put ourselves in the centre of natures smell-scape. Recently in reading the book Light Eaters I read a lovely passage that summed up this unspoken sentiment very eloquently. 

“I ankled out like a deer, smelling the air, picking across the scrubby lawn as though any sudden movement could unsettle the veil of scent…The language of scent, they said, was wafting messages on the air. I began to understand that a many-layered drama was playing out all around me, with more characters and plot lines than a Russian epic. Some of these I could smell, and there were many more my nose was too naive to notice.”  Zoe Schlanger – Light Eaters

And when you realise that plants aren’t producing scent purely for us but in fact they have a rich and vibrant olfactory world through which they communicate, we see we are just a tiny part of it. I think this fundamentally changes how we should view scent. Yes, we have the obvious flowers and herbs, but I also start to appreciate the scent of soil, the changing landscape of odours as I walk through fields, forests and along waterways. You soon realise that, as the landscape changes, so does the smell. 

I have spent some time this month teaching people that actually scent is a truly primal sense for us humans. Our brains evolved to follow those elusive chemical cues left by other plants, insects and animals as we all evolved. Senses like sight and touch came later in our evolutionary journey. Scent occupies such an empirical part of our experience - no other sense can conjure up a feeling like smell. And that’s because our sense of smell directly feeds to our hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for emotional memory. That gentle sniff of baked bread that takes you back to a childhood memory, or that close scent of a departed loved one that can bring you vividly back to them for a brief moment. 

Nature is playing with us like that all the time. Magnificent fir trees that reach high above us in our woodlands are known to create essential oil-rich scent-o-spheres so much so that the Japanese created the art of Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, to allow people the excuse to ‘bathe’ in the scent of the forest. These essential oils have been found to have profound effects on us and the environment, not least of which is that their delicate molecules can help seed clouds - a real boost when the oils are produced during drought, almost as if the forest has learned to create its own rain through scent. 

These powerful and nuanced elements of scent are all around us, informing one another in a game of attraction and repellant. Some scents lure you in and others are robust enough to push you away in a language so archaic that humans are sometimes not part of the landscape at all. 

And it’s this that I’ve learned to love about scent - not just to stop and smell the roses but to realise that all around there is a world of aromatic language that we have barely learned.  

Nature in Scent - By Garden 'Finder' Simon Constantine, July 2025