Dianthus

If I could bottle one garden scent, it would probably be this. Dianthus 'Mrs Sinkins' is an old-fashioned garden pink — the kind that grows in a low, grey-green cushion at the front of a border or spilling over the edge of a path — and it has the most extraordinary perfume of any plant I've grown. Rich, warm, intensely clove-scented, with something powdery underneath. It smells the way your grandmother's linen drawer did, or the way a really good old-fashioned sweet shop used to smell. It's the scent of a particular kind of Englishness that doesn't really exist any more, except in this flower.

The blooms are white, deeply fringed, and slightly shaggy — they burst their calyces and look a bit dishevelled, which I love. 'Mrs Sinkins' has never been a tidy flower. She's the kind who turns up to the party with her hair slightly undone and is the most interesting person in the room. The petals have that ragged, pinked edge that gives dianthus their common name — as if cut with pinking shears.

She was raised by the master of Slough Workhouse in 1868 and named after his wife. I find that unbearably charming — a workhouse master, breeding pinks in whatever scrap of garden he had, and naming his best one for his wife. The flower has outlived them both by over a hundred and fifty years. That's a love letter that kept going.

Grow her in full sun, in poor, well-drained soil — she does not want to be coddled. A gravel path edge, a raised bed, a stone trough. She's tough, compact, and smells like heaven. Cut a few stems for a tiny vase on the kitchen windowsill in June, and the whole room changes.