Honeysuckle

The smell of honeysuckle on a warm summer evening is one of those sense memories that takes you somewhere immediately. For me it's a lane in Devon, walking back from the pub in half-darkness, and suddenly being stopped by this wave of sweetness coming from the hedgerow. You couldn't see the flowers but you could find them with your eyes closed.

Lonicera periclymenum is our native honeysuckle — the one you find scrambling through hedges and up old walls all over the British countryside. The flowers are extraordinary things — tubular, creamy-white ageing to warm yellow, arranged in whorled clusters that look like tiny, elegant candelabras. And that scent. It intensifies at dusk, which is an evolutionary trick to attract the moths that pollinate it, but it feels like a gift designed specifically for summer evenings.

I grow one over an arch by my back door, and from June to August it's the thing that makes stepping into the garden feel like stepping into another world. The bees work it all day, and in the evening the hawk-moths arrive, hovering at the flowers like tiny, improbable helicopters.

You can cut a few trailing stems for the house, and they'll scent a whole room. They don't last long in a vase — a few days at best — but those few days of having that perfume drift through the kitchen are worth the brevity. Some flowers are about permanence. Honeysuckle is about the moment.