winter scents

The study has been filled with a series of competing smells.  The dominant one now is the slightly acrid tang of a wood fire that hasn't really got going yet, because I've just had the stove door open to add some more sections of ash, while a piece of bigger wood that failed to take when the stove was first lit is sitting on the hearth, gently reeking.  Ash, as the books say and as I tell audiences in my talk on trees, will burn wet, but that's not to say that unseasoned ash makes great kindling.  I'd better scout around tomorrow and look for some more dead twigs.  I collected a boxful yesterday, but I think we used them up last night.  The stove, while still sulky, does now have flame across the full width of the firebox, and the big lump should be able to go back in fairly soon, then the smell will abate.

Before that it was the pleasant smell of frying onion, as the Systems Administrator assembled supper.  It's going to be chilli, I think, but fried onion is the foundation of many good sauces.  It would be my desert island vegetable, the onion.  There are those who would not describe the fried onion smell as pleasant, who would think it should never be allowed to escape from the kitchen, and ideally would be whisked up by an extractor fan before it could get half way across the room.  I'm not so squeamish about home cooking.  The smell of real food, freshly made from scratch using proper ingredients, is part of what makes a house a home.

Somewhere underneath the onion and the wood smoke is the scent of the sprigs of Mahonia japonica I picked this morning.  It's a slightly gaunt evergreen shrub with rather matt foliage, the mahonia, and mine flops disconsolately forward because it's planted under the canopy of the wild cherry in less light than it would like in an ideal world.  But for looks it isn't a front line shrub.  Put it somewhere slightly out of the way where you won't have to worry about it until winter, when it flowers.

The flowers are individually small, spaced in clusters of four or five on long, lax stems.  They open from the bottom of the raceme upwards, taking their time over it so that those at the base of the stem have finished before the ones at the tip have started.  They die neatly, though, so the effect isn't spoiled by old, brown petals hanging on.  The uppermost flowers on my three stems are still tight yellow balls flushed with green, while the open flowers towards the base are small yellow bells surrounded by a second, more open row of petals, giving a poised effect like a tiny dancer's skirt.  They are a soft but clean shade of yellow, a very non-strident lemon.  The scent is glorious, sweet and spicy but not cloying, and more noticeable from the cut blooms in the warmth of a room than it was in the cold and damp of the garden before breakfast this morning.

Mahonia japonica is one parent of the popular Mahonia x media cultivars, which you will find in most garden centres, especially in late autumn when they're in bloom, the industry assuming that people are more likely to buy plants in flower.  Mahonia x media in its varieties is fine, reliable and vigorous.  I grow 'Winter Sun' myself, and rejoice each year when it comes out.  It grew very fast on dreadfully poor soil, does a splendid job of screening the oil tank, and the bees like it.  I have no quarrel with Mahonia x media, but when I consider Mahonia japonica I have to agree with the verdict of Graham Stuart Thomas, that God's is the finer shrub.