Do you stop to smell the roses?

The scent of jasmine in the air is intoxicating, isn’t it? I think I may be addicted to it. Every day I yank flowers from the bushes and keep them in my bedroom, my office and my car, where they grow brittle and scatter papery petals everywhere. I am breathing in a sprig of jasmine as I write.

The knowledge that soon the flowers will be gone lends the experience a bittersweet air, and I wish I could bottle it and keep it safe. Jasmine essential oil simply doesn’t smell the same; it’s too cloying and heavy. Real jasmine, in the garden, draped along fences and balconies, is light and airy, almost a scented piece of sky.

I am inexorably drawn to flowers that smell nice. Just as I cannot walk past the jasmine without stopping to inhale a little piece of heaven, I cannot see a rosebush without leaning over to smell the roses, or pause by a Yesterday Today and Tomorrow without indulging in the ridiculous sweetness of its multicoloured blooms.

I have always done this. In Sydney, during those lonely months where I would stalk the streets of Mosman in a quest to find other people’s cats to pet, I would also stop to sniff the frangipani, and cast my eye over the petals scattered on the ground to find fresh ones to take home. There they would fragrance the apartment for a day or two before they wilted.

I’ve never seen anyone else stop to smell the roses, certainly not in public, and I often wonder whether anyone else does it. To pause and inhale, even for that little while, is to allow time to settle and be still, however briefly; to live in the now, as the authors interviewed on Oprah will say.

The jasmine is fading, to be replaced in turn by the wisteria; already it is draped lavishly around the balcony, blossoms hanging in purple curtains like something out of ancient Babylon. Less redolent of a time of newness and freshness than the jasmine, it is not so easy to like. Pleasant though it is, its perfume is more sullen, somehow; there is less of a spring in its olfactory step.

After the wisteria there will be the jacaranda blossoms, though they don’t really have a scent (and if they do it is musky and dark, redolent of old compost heaps and wet tar). Summer will stretch luxuriously over the months before settling into autumn, and then the dry and dusty months of winter, when I will fold myself into those pinched, short days, and hunch my shoulders against the cold, and dream of jasmine.