^ The Scented (garden jjg 



been familiar from childhood. Few people appreciate 

 the scent of broad bean flowers, simply because the broad 

 bean is a ' vegetable,' yet it is one of the most beautiful 

 of flower scents. Broad beans are usually regarded as 

 the only i vegetable ' with scented flowers, but sea-kale 

 flowers have almost as attractive a scent, for although 

 less sweet it is nut-like and mellower. The only other 

 1 vegetables ' with scented attractions are, I think, the 

 delicate morel mushrooms, which appear very early in 

 the year, and have a most pleasant scent. The scent of 

 elder, when one encounters it on the highway, is ' heady ' 

 and overpowering, but in a hayfield, when it blends with 

 the newly-mown hay curing in the sun, it is a pleasant 

 smell. Meadowsweet in the mass is a dull and rather 

 heavy smell, but if one is in a boat and the scent is 

 wafted by a passing breeze across water this perfume is 

 sweet, and suggestive of the fulness and richness of 

 summer. The smell of the peppermint plants by the 

 stream-side, crushed by the boat against the river 

 bank, is also pleasantest when water-borne. To town- 

 dwellers the scent of hay in haymaking time must be 

 almost unbearable, for surely no other smell makes them 

 realize with the same poignancy that their lot is that of 

 prisoners, no matter how gilded their cages may be. For 

 the scent of hay in all its stages is one of those all-per- 

 vading primitive scents of which it is more true to say 

 that one is enfolded in it rather than that one smells it. 

 Even a whiff of hay scent from a passing cart in a city has 

 a magical effect, for the street disappears and one sees 

 instead the shimmering heat in the hayfield at noonday, 

 the hedgerow starred with wild roses and the first bramble 

 flowers, the butterflies flitting to and fro, the lowly many- 



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