Ephemeral Flowers and Subjective Scents

After a brief but very odorous time in the spotlight, the lilacs are starting to go downhill. The Palabin and Miss Kim are starting to pale and then go brown. Here's a picture of the Miss Kim in her pot, waiting to be planted in the front garden when it exists:

Miss Kim lilac in its pot

The flowering period might be short, but it is glorious. You can often smell the scent from 3+m away at the front door.

The plan is to take up a triangle of concrete at the front to make green space in front of the house. Over the last year or two I've been collecting shrubs, many of the scented, many of them for autumn/winter interest, for the garden to be.

The thing about front gardens is they're a different beast to back gardens. Unless they're very big they don't offer any privacy, so you're not going to sit in them, or stroll through them. But what you are going to do is walk past them every single day on your way in and out. Our back garden is very much a summer garden, filled with deciduous shrubs and herbaceous perennials, so I hope the front can be something to bring a bit of planty goodness to our lives when it's cold and dark.

There have been a few bumps in the road of this plan though. Scent is quite hard to prove before purchase. Unless you buy the plant in bloom, you're going on a text description of how scented it is. There's no such thing as a scent picture, and suppliers don't normally add scratch and sniff panels to plant labels. And it's also quite subjective: my wife, who otherwise has a good nose for scent, swears that Viola odorata is scentless, but I can smell it from meters away if the wind is blowing in the right direction.

Which brings me to Philadelphus 'Manteau d'Hermine'. Everyone knows that philadelphuses are strongly scented, and most suppliers claim that 'Manteau d'Hermine' is too. Unfortunately, the flowers seem completely scentless to me, and my wife can only detect a faint scent if the flower's right in front of her nose. Here is the offending shrub:

To smell or not to smell, that is the question

I can tolerance a short, single flush of flowers if the show is spectacular. Unfortunately, a scentless philadelphus is just disappointing. If this particular plant doesn't do better next season, I think it'll be off to the giant compost heap in the sky...