Sweet Violet

Sweet violets are the flower equivalent of finding a twenty-pound note in your coat pocket. You're walking through the garden in late February, still in your winter coat, expecting nothing — and then there it is. That scent. Impossibly sweet, powdery, fleeting, drifting up from a patch of heart-shaped leaves at the base of a hedge.

Viola odorata has been cultivated for its perfume for at least two thousand years, and the scent is genuinely like nothing else in nature. It contains ionone, a compound that temporarily shuts down your scent receptors, which means you smell it, then lose it, then smell it again. It's the most maddening, addictive fragrance in the plant world — always arriving, never staying.

They're tiny. Laughably tiny compared to most flowers people get excited about. But I'd rather have a small bunch of violets on my desk in February than almost anything else in bloom at that time of year. They're the first whisper of a promise that winter is finishing. Tuck them into a little glass bottle — something with a narrow neck — and they look like a miniature painting.

You can still buy violet plants for practically nothing at garden centres. Pop them under a hedge or along a shady path and forget about them. They'll creep and spread and one grey February morning they'll stop you in your tracks. That's the deal with violets — you give them almost nothing and they give you back the first scent of the year.