Scent of the Garden

It is fine to cultivate a scent garden simply by digging up soil in a given area, the way you might begin a vegetable garden. But if possible, try to keep the herbs separated by housing them within the confines of their own small habitats.

Create any shape you like by attaching wooden panels or boards together that are about one inch thick and four to eight inches high. Set them on a substrate that will allow water to filter into the soil rather than collect and pool. Fill the space evenly with soil at least four inches deep. Now you are ready for some herbs. If you pick the right plants it is possible to get a veritable bouquet of smells in the garden.

Some herbs give off their odor freely. But to get a whiff of many, students must first pluck a leaf. The scent will linger as they roll the leaf between their fingers. For a nice base of fragrance, try planting some common herbs like basil, mint, lavender, oregano, rosemary and thyme.

They are often used in cooking and have very specific smells. Next, try adding a few herbs that produce aromas children are already familiar with. There are a lot of plants that smell like lemon when you press upon their leaves. Five common ones are lemon balm, lemongrass, lemon thyme, lemon basil and lemon verbena.

Many herbs also smell of mint when you pinch their leaves or flowers between your fingers. A few well-known ones are costmary, mountain mint and St. The banana mint even has a faint scent of fruit.

FILLING THE GARDEN WITH SCENT

Keep one tip in mind when working with the original mint species Mentha though—it tends to take over. It is important to keep this plant separated from others. If you box if off by itself that is fine. If it is one plant in a larger garden you will want to put it in its own pot. Herbs come in an array of odd odors. Pineapple sage, for instance, does actually smell like pineapple. In contrast, the world of sight is a static world of objects.

He draws our atention away from the stimulus and the historical problem of representation and toward the body and the spatial environment about which the senses provide information. For Rodaway, the senses are sign systems that mediate communi- cative exchanges between subjective humans. He distinguishes between the senses in terms of reception, deined as a mode of sensation acquired through a speciic sensory organ, and cognition, deined as a mental framework that imposes meaning on received sensory information. Smell typically requires spatial immediacy to be discerned.

Likewise, a building may have a distinctive smell, as in the yeasty aroma of a bakery or the mustiness of a library. Whether emanating from the landscape or a building, however, smells all require pres- ence: Indeed, the experience of smell penetrates beyond mere environmental con- tiguity because odors enter into the body. In the act of breathing—which may be consciously controlled but is certainly not voluntary—one can scarcely avoid smelling, but one can also actively pursue it and seek to intensify the sensation. When sniing a delicate scent, one instinctively leans forward to put the nose close to the source and inhale forcefully to bring the odor not only into the nose but speciically up to the nasal membrane of odor-detecting nerve cells.

Murray Schafer divided sound into diferent spheres. Unlike the soundield, the soundscape is a human-centered model; it surrounds us and comes from external stimuli that we do not control.

In his chapter for this volume, Hugh Livingston has produced a lengthy list of classiicatory terms and explan- atory concepts for the study of sonic and acoustic environments. We cannot physically experience the sensory reality of a historical moment and, thus, we must turn to tex- tual descriptions and pictures, both of which are forms of visual representation.

We depend on the visual to substitute for the other senses, and perhaps because of this dependence, vision has a privileged place in art, architecture, and landscape history, at least in the West. Freud famously suggested that when humans began to walk upright, their eyes began to substitute for their noses.

Sound is treated as a physiological, mechanical, aesthetic, and intellectual phenome- non. But to the extent that smell is studied, it is only with respect to the chemistry of commercial products, particularly food and perfume—it is not regarded as having any intellectual content at all, perhaps because it has none. Archives and libraries are teeming with textual and pictorial documents that tell us what gardens looked like, but we must search much harder for evidence about their smells and noises.

In the chapters by Hyde and Zhang, we learn about the acute atention paid to sound, silence, and scent and the symbolic meanings atributed to them. From all of this work, it is clear that historical gardens were redolent with sounds and scents that were not only welcomed but also cultivated to enhance the sensory experience of the garden and deepen its meanings. And yet, despite knowing that these sensory experiences were part of the garden, we struggle to recuperate them, knowing that the transitory nature of the lost fragrances and sounds makes them fade easily from the historical record.

While both sound and smell are ephemeral, smell, in particular, has one especially salient factor that keeps us from studying it: Although I have argued that words ofer stable representations that compensate for the ephemerality of sensory efects, the words that we use to describe the senses also change through time and must, therefore, be understood within their historical and social contexts. In other words, the length of time a word has been used in English for the concepts of smelling or smell generally correlates with its unfavorable connotations.

Possibly, the smell receded into the background of their consciousness, the olfactory equivalent of white noise. Yet in time people came to associate the smell of putrefaction with the plague, atributing the disease to the noxious odors themselves, rather than understanding both to be symptoms of unseen bacterial contagion. He argued that the histo- rians who write about the material world have typically belonged to a class of people who sit at a desk and do not labor, except in the sense of pushing pen across paper and struggling for ideas.

Not managers, but manual laborers, had the jobs and the living conditions most likely to give them body odor. When we say that someone smells, we mean that the body smells unpleasant. To refer to a good smell, we are more likely to use the terms ragrance or scent, and the scent is assumed to come from outside the human body, applied as a perfume. In the twentieth and twenty-irst centuries, by contrast, perfume is more likely to be associated with the feminine and therefore consciously or unconsciously with the atributes of weak- ness, emotion, and lack of reason.

However, the present volume from Dumbarton Oaks takes a diferent approach. In what ways are plants, gardens, and landscapes produced so as to stimulate the senses? What evidence do we have for historical sensory experience? What is lost when we forget to acknowledge the sensory environment of the past or simply overlook its traces?

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In framing these questions, the volume does not limit itself to the West—too oten assumed to stand in for the world as a whole—but instead explores speciic cultural and historic conditions of sensory experience from Asia to North America. For beter or worse, the ield of sense studies is itself an ephem- eral endeavor that is changing as rapidly as the information taken in by the senses them- selves. Chinese opera and American hip-hop are not universally appreciated by all listeners.

Berg, , — But music, it must be admit- ted, is a small portion of the sonic landscape. It may be the easiest aspect of sound to study—with all due respect to my musicologist colleagues—because it was elevated to an art and as such produced multiple traces in the form of writen musical notation, instruments, and images of singers and musi- cians.

But few have studied the natural or designed soundscape of ancient gardens.

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