Aromatic cistus foliage scents the morning air

Press, 13 November 1981, Page 10

Aromatic cistus foliage scents the morning air

Oardener’s’ w DIARY

Derrick Rooney

The cistuses are not usually included in lists of aromatic plants, but several species and hybrids have sweet-scented foliage. It is an evanescent scent that comes and goes with weather; only the foliage has it — the flowers are scentless. On a recent mild, dewy morning the hybrid ‘Brilliancy’ was unusually good — I could smell it when I opened the back door, 20 feet away. You don’t have to brush against this bush to release the aroma; it pops out, if it is going to, of its own accord. Sometimes it just isn’t there at all. Cistus ladanifer, the “gum cistus,” with large white flowers marked with dark spots, is another fragrant one. Its warm, fruity scent comes from a transparent, sticky substance which oozes from the leaves in hot weather and makes the whole plant clammy to touch. The foliage of Cistus Monspeliensis also has the scent and sticky coating, but the young leaves and flower buds of this species are hairy as well as sticky, an odd combination. “Brilliancy” is purportedly a selection of Cistus purpureus, which in turn is not a species but a “hybrid

swarm” which resulted from crosses, both in the wild and in gardens, between C. ladanifer and a smaller species, C. villosus which is scentless. It is a bigger, healthier and more free-flowering bush than either of its putative parents, and the flowers are largish, fuchsia . purple with deeper blotches. The greyish leaves are not noticeably sticky and are quite narrow — much narrower than those of either parent, something which casts a shadow over its pedigree. Cistus monspeliensis also has narrow leaves, but they are a very deep and intense green, with a crumpled look. The flowers are pure white, small but profuse. “Brilliancy” and its parents all. strike readily from cuttings, taken in late summer. C. monspeliensis would probably also strike easily, and now that I am down to one specimen (the others were either felled by the dog or dug out to make room for new plants) I must remember to take some for security when the time is ripe — about a month after flowering, when the new growth is beginning to firm up. If there is ripe seed on the bush you don't need to take cuttings, because the

seeds germinate freely and the young plants flower in two or three years, and make, I think, better bushes than cuttings do. Several rose species and near-species make good companions for cistuses, and they, too, sometimes have aromatic foliage. The sweetest is the sweetbriar, our noxious weed, and on a dewy morning or after a summer shower it adds a dimension to rabbit shooting. There are more gardenworthy aromatic roses. Two of my favourites are seedlings that I raised from open-pollinated seed off Rosa holodonta, a tall Chinese species; they are mostly holodonta but have a dash of secret ingredient, from which the smell comes, throughout summer they are worth a passing sniff on a warm evening, which is useful because their flowering period is short. Roosa primula, also

Chinese and with yellow flowers, is another scented species; it is sometimes available from old-rose specialists. None of my reference books mentions Escallonia macrantha as an aromatic shrub, but there are days when our escallonia hedge is the sweetest thing around. You don’t even have to brush against it, because the scent is released spontaneously from special glands on the undersides of the leaves, and you can smell it — sweet and spicy, sometimes almost unbearably so — from a long way off. It completely hoodwinked me when I first got a whiff of it; I spent hours looking for flowers in the vicinity before I discovered that the smell was coming from the hedge.

Plants like these, which scent dull corners at most times of the year, are very useful because you can enjoy them without having to plant them in prominent places where people will brush against them — as you must do with rosemary, or sage or lavender, helichrysum angustifolium, the “curry plant,” so called, is one. This is an unprepossessing little nar-row-leafed silver bush which wafts in the air a powerful

scent of Madras curry. On a dewy day you can smell it the length of the lawn away. I like curry, so I like this plant. Oddly enough, the leaves of the curry plant when crushed have practically no scent — it’s all in the air. The dried foliage doesn’t smell of anything except hay and the association with curry is by proxy only — curry plant is not one of the multitude of herbs and spices that go into curry powder, and you can’t cook with it. Neither can you cook with the Japanese “star anise,” one of my recent aromatic acquisitions. This is Illicium anisatum, one of about 18 mostly small to mediumsized aromatic shrubs, all evergreen, from China and Japan. There are two more from the United States. All the species are aromatic, and one, the Chinese I. vernum, does yield aniseed. They are very closely related to the magnolias, but mostly more frost tender. My young plant of Illicium anisatum has been sitting in its planter bag in the shelter of the terrace for a couple of months, awaiting suitable planting-out weather — I was tempted after last month’s warm rains but held

jack, which is just as well because we have had frost since the cold snap at the week-end. Still, this is one of the hardiest of the illiciums, if any can be called hardy, and should survive in our climate if I can find it a congenial spot in the garden. It is described as growing into a small tree in the wild, but as I have seen it growing in Christchurch it is a shrub about a metre high, and this is the maximum I expect from it, though I may be

wrong. The flowers are greenish-yellow. Also on the terrace in its planter bag is a youngster of the pick of the Chinese species, I. henryi, marginally less aromatic but more ornamental, and with pink flowers. Both these shrubs favour the sort of cool conditions in which rhododendrons thrive. Their glossy leaves have a rich and spicy fragrance, but it is not emitted spontaneously; you have to crush a leaf to liberate it.