Nosing around the fall garden

Those warm humid evenings of summer are dwindling away. I’m not sure I’ll miss the tantalizing aroma of a burnt hamburger on a smoky barbecue wafting through the neighbourhood but I will miss the enchanting fragrance of flowers. There are still a few plants around the garden using beguiling scents in the hope of attracting an insect partner. Not unlike closing time in a bar as last orders are called.

However, at this time in the season, the mating of flowers and pollinators is mostly complete and seeds are ready to fall, or they’re awaiting a breeze to spread them afar. That may be so, but there are a few flowers still releasing fragrance. My old roses may be half naked, their leaves having succumbed mainly to black spot and insects arriving for a final a feed, and yet they manage to push out blooms that are just as heavy with scent as they are on a June evening.

There’s no stooping to sniff my only red variety, name long forgotten; it's so tall I can’t reach to have a sniff. It’s not even a climber, yet it has sturdy stems a couple of metres tall, higher than the black spot has reached.

I have a much healthier rose named Canadian Shield, the first of Vineland’s 49^th Parallel collection developed by Vineland. Although it’s only lightly fragrant, it blooms all summer. I really should replace my old ones with this series, but I simply can’t abandon old friends.

That includes my Polianthes tuberosa except it isn’t blooming as it should. It’s been renamed Agave amica, a much easier name to remember if you’re seeking one, but tuberose is still the common name. It’s a tender plant that grows from tuberous roots so it can be stored over winter the same as other summer flowering bulbs, and I did, replanting it in a container this spring. And yet, even while producing lots of strap-like leaves, it hasn’t flowered. I’d know if it did because the powerful scent it releases is almost too much, especially if you had to share an elevator with one. It’s so strong it’s used as the middle note in the production of perfume.

That’s much the same with the brugmansia that’s sitting in a large planter under the semi-shaded pergola.I grew it from a cutting given to me by a collector last year, and it’s now over a metre across and almost as wide and will grow too large to fit in an elevator. It’s covered now with beautiful trumpet-like flowers — angels trumpets.

Like many brugmansia it is heavily fragrant, especially at dawn and dusk when it fills the air, probably wafting through a neighbour’s bedroom window. This one is a cultivar called Angels Exotic, hybridized in 2004 in Germany by Anne Kirchner-Abel. The flowers are pink and double, even triple, with the centre beginning a creamy yellow before turning pink.

 On a fall evening, when conditions are right, summer doesn’t seem so far away, and as it turns cooler, I can almost appreciate the aroma of a barbecue.