Today as I opened the greenhouse door ready to step in and cull some salad leaves a scent filled my nostrils. The fragrance was compounded of geranium and jasmine with a note of oriental mustard, once I had cut it. The jasmine, a well-established rescue plant from my family, is normally by our front porch and is sheltering in the greenhouse over winter. A few bright periods last week, under glass, persuaded it to twine into flower. What a beautiful exotic surprise this was. Many memories mingled - hot foreign holidays, the associated intense scent of lilies brought to me in hospital after my diagnosis of diabetes, or more sombrely, the funeral bouquets laid on the low shelves of crematoria.
At home it was too cold to grow jasmine, or perhaps the fashion for giving it as an indoor houseplant had not reached British supermarkets. So we had the outdoor scentless winter jasmine with little bright yellow flowers. Much later, when engaged in gardening work we tended these. Like the polyanthus starting to flower up here, the pink cyclamen and the tips of emerging bulbs, winter jasmine has always been a promise of sunnier days to come.
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