Jasmine

There's a wall at the back of my garden where the summer jasmine has been growing for longer than I've lived here. On warm July evenings, when I sit outside with a glass of something cold, the scent drifts across the garden in waves — sweet, heady, almost tropical in its intensity, but with a clean, green freshness underneath that stops it being cloying. It's one of the great plant scents. Perfumers have been trying to capture it for centuries and the real thing still beats them all.

The flowers themselves are modest — small, white, star-shaped, growing in loose clusters among the twining stems. Individually, they'd be easy to overlook. Collectively, when the whole plant is in flower, they create a cloud of white against the green that's both simple and overwhelming. It's the scent that dominates, though. Always the scent.

Summer jasmine is a vigorous, slightly unruly climber that needs a wall or a trellis or something sturdy to scramble over. It can be a bit of a thug, frankly — sending out long, reaching shoots in all directions — but I've come to appreciate that enthusiasm. A jasmine that behaves itself isn't really doing its job.

I train mine loosely around the back door, so the scent drifts in through open windows on summer evenings. That was deliberate. The whole point of jasmine is to be smelled when you're not expecting it — cooking dinner, reading a book, falling asleep with the window open. It's an ambush flower.

You can pick a few sprigs and float them in a bowl of water by the bed. The scent in a warm bedroom on a summer night is the kind of thing that makes you understand why poets wrote about this flower for centuries.