Gifts of stinky candles and soaps pile up in our guest bathroom. We keep hoping a visitor will sneak away with the whole inventory of these ubiquitous gifts of friendship.

Fragranced shampoos, conditioners, lotions: ick. Perfumes, incense, and most cleaning products repulse me. Chemical air fresheners attempt to smell like a summer breeze or a spring rain. Our culture has, sadly and all too successfully, removed itself from the natural world. Does anyone know what spring rain actually smells like anymore?

When I look at a container of personal care or cleaning products, a quick glance at the list of ingredients determines whether it will come home with me. Chances are good it won’t. Olfactory marketing fails on me. Those chemical odors, mimicking some chemist’s vision of nature, give off volatile organic compounds that mask the smells of parabens, alcohols, lauryl sulfates, and other manufactured compounds. These smells may sell products, but I don’t want to smear those products on my body.

Air fresheners cover the smells of stale air. Moisture and stale air lead to mold and mildew, which don’t smell good. We instinctively avoid these odors, and hopefully we know to eliminate the underlying problems that cause it. Molds can devastate a person’s well-being, triggering asthma and other lung ailments, headaches, and worse. Proper ventilation and air circulation usually remedy these problems, unless they are really big problems. An open window on a cool day might even let in that summer breeze.

I revel in the seasonal fragrances that float in the air. An occasional whiff delivers a gift: lilac on a warm spring morning, garden soil after a hard rain, rotting leaves in autumn’s shortening days. Peonies overpower as we scurry by their showy frothiness. Thyme, mint and oregano greet us perkily as we trudge across our shaggy yard. Lavender, citrus, fennel, mints: I appreciate nature’s perfumes.

How easily we ignore the fact that those fragrances aren’t really there for us, silly humans. Flower shape, color, fragrance, bloom time, size, and location work magically together to woo birds and insects. Pollen and nectar are exchanged in nature’s economy, nature’s smell of money.

My favorite fragrance? Milkweed.

Don’t tell the perfumeries, they’ll get it all wrong. Delicate, yet embodying summer’s heft, it is sweet, alluring, perfect. Isn’t that the ideal combination?

To me, milkweed smells like the moments between a humid summer day, the sky hazy and stubborn, and that much-anticipated cooling crack of lightening. Can you smell it now? It smells like a pungently sweet flower way off in the distance. Scanning your horizon, you can’t pinpoint the source. Right there step back and look under your nose, humbly, subtly, wafting into the air.

Not a showy cut flower, milkweed oozes a milky stickiness and its flower droops once cut. Enjoy it in situ. The mauve flower buds turn a delicate pink as they open, luring insects to drink their nectar. Grooves in the flowers trip up the insects, holding them captive while they struggle for freedom, covering them with pollen.

As we walk the road to our mailbox, we monitor their growth and anticipate their blooms. Over the years, slowly, the patch spreads along the road, intermingled with a cacophony of wildflowers and tall grasses each with its own moment of brilliance yarrow, meadowsweet, daisies, asters, vetch, goldenrod, Canada lily.

Asclepias syriaca, a native roadside weed, has made a comeback since the Monarch butterfly depopulation grabbed our collective attention. The orange and black larvae (caterpillars) of the Monarch feed only on milkweed. The toxins in the plant are ingested by the larvae and protect it from predation; those same toxins can destroy the value of hay or silage for cattle, and milkweed is tough to eradicate. And so the battle between conservation and eradication of milkweed began. Long considered a noxious perennial weed by farmers, it reestablishes itself if cut back or tilled under. Extraction by the roots is difficult, as remaining pieces may reincarnate a plant, fine for our field, maintained for wildlife and not livestock.

Hybrid varieties abound at garden centers showier flowers, variegated leaves, even purple leaves, but my favorite, without question, is the rough-and-tumble, classic, fragrant weed.

Ah, but I doubt a milkweed candle would sell.

By Laura Richardson, Master Gardener