Summer Scents

In case you hadn’t heard, London is officially in the middle of a heatwave.  If there were any doubts about this, the tabloids dished out on public transport have certainly laid them to rest.  This evening at least two of them ran with a story on the inflated prices of bottled water, which we are instructed to carry with us at all times. In my mind, a long gin and tonic is more suitable and offers better value for money.

To counter the heat a few evenings ago, I opened wide the large sash window in my bedroom, leaned out and inhaled deeply.  I was expecting nothing more than a whiff of exhaust fume but, to my surprise, I smelled the ‘Gertude Jekyll’ roses in the garden my room overlooks – and something else.  Another sniff.  And another. Jasmine.  Somewhere on my half-run-down, half-gentrified street in the badlands of Brixton, where muscly, yellow-eyed dogs strain on metal leashes and the sirens of various emergency services run all day and all night, someone had thought of the way the sweet, exotic scent of jasmine would float on the warm night air, and had planted a shrub.

This evening I stepped off the 159 bus from Piccadilly and walked down my road thinking about nothing much.  From the flat conversions above the street I head the clink of dinner plates being stacked on a draining board, a hair dryer through an open window.  Someone cycled past. Quiet.  And then  that same scent.  I stepped forward.  Gone.  I stepped back a few paces and looked around.  Nothing.  I walked forward slowly, sniffing all the time.  And there it was.  Jasmine, tucked into a small bed between the garden gate and some wheelie bins. With its pale white flowers guiding me to it, I stretched out my arm and picked a small stem, hoping no-one would decide at that moment to open the door and take out the rubbish.

I held the stem close to my face and recalled a moment on a similarly warm evening in Madurai, India, where the scent of fresh jasmine flowers in someone’s hair had calmly risen above the melee of pedestrians, scooters, autorickshaws and old Ambassador taxis. Heaven.

My botanical knowledge is such that I’ve no idea what species this jasmine is.  Typically for an evening-scented plant its flowers are white and a few moments ago a moth came fluttering into my room. (‘The cashmere!’ I thought in alarm, although that which I have I’ve bought from charity shops and have darned already.)  I expect the moth was drawn in by the light, rather than the flower itself, but the principle is the same – the scent and those white flowers attract nature’s night workers and moths are pretty useful pollinators.  In St James’s park recently I noticed nicotiana in early flower; that, too, is white and heavily scented at night.

In the big Midlands garden, I grew up with star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) which is a different beast altogether.  It climbed thick and heavy on a trellis and every now and then the lovely domestic worker my parents employed for thirty years,  fearing snakes and much to our consternation, would instruct the gardener to trim that climber until it was bald.  Here is a picture of it on a good day:

Now that they’ve moved to the city where it’s warmer, my parents have been contemplating  indigenous starry wild jasmine, Jasminum multipartitum, or, if you’d rather say the Zulu, imfohlafohlane.  Have any of you grown that, and does it have lovely scent, too?

Home now, I’ve put the stem I picked in an old glass jar and it’s here, next to my laptop.  In a moment I’ll move it to my bedside and fall asleep, hopefully dreaming of hill stations, cardamon, shooting stars over the Bay of Bengal, holy cows and sacred elephants, houseboats and coconuts.  Or not.  The sirens are still going.