Fragrance is the one plant quality that has to be close to work, and it is the one most often planted too far away to notice.
Scent moves with air, and there is a lot of moving air here. On a still evening fragrance pools and drifts and fills a patio. In the afternoon wind it is gone before it reaches anybody. The practical consequence is that a fragrant plant forty feet out in a border is a plant nobody will ever smell, however good it is.
So they belong where people pass within a few feet: beside a door, along a walk, at the edge of a patio, under a window that gets opened, next to where somebody sits. A lilac at the corner of the drive, where people walk past it twice a day, does more than the same lilac in the middle of the lawn.
Two kinds worth separating. Flower fragrance arrives on its own and lasts as long as the bloom — a few weeks, usually in spring. Foliage fragrance releases when something brushes or crushes the leaves, which means it works all season but only on contact. Along a path edge, where people touch it going by, foliage fragrance is reliable in a way flower scent is not.
And evening is worth planning for. Several of the strongest-scented plants release most heavily at dusk, which is exactly when people are outside in summer here.
