Kathi Keville - Aromatherapy Garden, The

We cannot see or hear scent, making it seemingly less tangible than our senses of sight, touch, taste, or hearing. Step into a fragrance garden and it is almost magical how layers of aromas greet your nose completely unannounced. This delightful mix changes with amazing frequency walking through the garden. Some aromas dance across your senses while others are deep and exotic. There are familiar scents, while others leave you at a loss for words.

A gate marks the official entry to the authors garden, but heady fragrances announce its presence long before one arrives.

Some of the best paths to follow are fragrant.

We respond to these intriguing smells with sensual delight, but while fragrant plants are enticing us, they are also hard at work, modifying our mood and frame of mind every time we inhale. Plant scientists are discovering what gardeners have always known: the fragrant garden reduces stress. Heady plant aromas make us laugh and smile more, and leave us with a sense of contentment. Its not all about the human experience, either. Scent is also important in attracting pollinators, deterring predators, and even allowing plants to communicate with each other.

A bloom in full splendor, a cup of hot herbal tea, a favorite cologne, or the earth after a summer raina multitude of smells enrich our lives daily. The impact is profound. Scent enhances life experiences, such as tasting and sensuality. It is also the stuff of which dreams and memories are made. It embodies poetry, mythology, imagination.

Natures potpourri may seem enchanted, but fragrance is based on an assortment of invisible but very real aromatic compounds. They fit together like a puzzle to make up essential oils. These tiny oils easily float through the air, and can be released simply by pressing on a fragrant leaf.

Aromatic flowers, leaves, stems, fruit, roots, and bark typically concentrate essential oils in special cells. Different plant families have characteristic places where they store the oils. For example, most members of the mint family make and keep scent in fine, glandular hairs that cover their leaves. The carrot family prefers to hold aromatic essential oils in tubes in their seeds, or sometimes in their stems and roots. You can see this in plants like angelica, coriander, dill, and fennel.

The pungent aromas of Mexican marigold and sages are brought to nose level.

Each time you inhale, tiny, aromatic molecules hitchhike a ride. Smell a rose or basil leaf, and the compounds you breathe are first greeted high in the nose by the olfactory epithelium: two small receptors that are about the size of dimes. These receptors use tiny cilia filaments to catch and identify molecules, seemingly by their shape. The information is sent to olfactory bulbs located at the base of the brain, which interpret it and send a report to the limbic system. That is where different scents are interpreted and sent to the brain, to analyze and coordinate with other senses. The limbic system also ties our sense of smell to emotions and memory. It distinguishes between aromas that draw us in and odors that fend us off. It determines when there is an emergency, such as smelling something burning. All of this happens in less than a second, making our perception and reaction to a scent instantaneous. You immediately identify the aroma as rose or basil, and think either bouquet or pesto.