Cistus

Cistus flowers have the same one-day-only quality as poppies — tissue-thin, crumpled petals that unfurl each morning and drop by evening, replaced by new flowers the next day. The transience is part of the beauty. Each flower exists for a single day, and it uses that day well.

Cistus × purpureus produces flowers about three inches across — five broad, crumpled, silky petals in a deep rose-pink, each one marked with a dramatic, dark-maroon blotch at the base. The effect is of pink tissue paper stained with ink, or watercolour that's bled. At the centre, a boss of golden stamens vibrates with bees. The whole flower looks handmade, imperfect, and utterly compelling.

The shrub itself is Mediterranean through and through — low, mounding, covered in dark, slightly sticky, aromatic evergreen leaves that smell of resin and warm earth on a hot day. That stickiness is labdanum — a fragrant resin that's been used in perfumery since ancient times. Run your hand over the leaves on a July afternoon and your fingers come away scented with something warm, balsamic, and ancient. It's the smell of the Mediterranean maquis distilled into a suburban garden.

It needs the hottest, driest, poorest spot you can give it. A sunny gravel garden, a south-facing bank, the base of a sun-baked wall. Rich soil and regular watering will kill it faster than neglect. In the right position, it flowers prodigiously through June and July — each morning a fresh crop of those crumpled pink-and-maroon flowers, each evening a carpet of fallen petals on the gravel below. It's the most Mediterranean thing you can grow in a British garden, and on a warm day, with the resin scent rising and the bees working those blotched pink flowers, you could almost believe you were somewhere south of Perpignan.