Growing Wild: Gardening as a sensory experience via Daily Hampshire Gazette

Gardening is in part so deeply satisfying because it has the ability to stoke all of the senses, but none more profoundly than our sense of smell. Fragrance in the garden has the power to unearth old memories and to etch new ones, to connect us deeply to our own cycles of life on earth. For me, the smell of wisteria instantly brings me back to the library parking lot of my childhood, and while I am happily rooted in the present, there is a thrill in being whisked instantly and briefly into the feeling of being a child. Right now the smell of paperwhites fills my home; forcing these bulbs indoors every winter is a ritual that I have been doing now since I was young. The gardens that I build now incorporate elements of all of the places I have passed through, and scent is one of the most elemental ways in which this connection is made.