The heat here can be intense and most of us start early, moving through the trees before the sun gets too high. The smell that greets me first thing in the morning takes my breath away. It’s the scent of overripe apricots, of fruit scattered on the ground where it has fallen or been discarded. Unlike apricots still on the tree, this fallen fruit is rich and sugared, as if made into jam. There’s a density to the scent; it can range from honeyed sweetness through to whisky booziness. As the sun climbs higher, the smell of slowly rotting fruit becomes more pronounced and permeates the entire orchard. Insects hum, their ground-level noise a carpet of sound that we climb above every time we move our ladders. The fruit feels warm in our hands but its scent is lighter, fresher. It seems to retain a semblance of its floral beginnings, something like blossom touched with dew.

As the day progresses, my nose becomes less sensitive to the apricots and starts to pick up other smells that linger in the air of the orchard. I notice the scent of grass sweetened with flower ing clover. The metallic smell of the ladders, as the aluminium heats up. The smell of sweat and sun lotion, the fragrance of the latter standing out against the quieter, natural smell of the orchard. The leaves and trunks as I brush up against them. The smell of water drifting from sprinklers during the night hours.

Sometimes, after dinner, I go for a short stroll on the hill behind the orchard, where a single taramea grows up from a patch of dry soil between two rocky outcrops. I sit and look at it; of all the plants I’ve ever seen it strikes me as the wildest, the most untamable. I’ve never cut its leaves or smelt its gum.

Up on the hill the smell of wild thyme is so strong that it burns my nose and catches in my throat. It’s medicinal and, just like the wormwood in the sensory garden, clears out my nasal passages, at times making my eyes water. There are other wild flowers growing on the hill: viper’s bugloss, briar rose with leaves that carry the smell of apple and, everywhere, like black shadows across the land, pine trees. I’ve made a blend, a response to the orchard hill that I’ve named Wildings. It’s strongly aromatic, the thyme and pine tussle for domination, and I’ve had to work through many dilutions and variations in order to ensure that neither of these notes overwhelms the rest of the blend.

Through sheer good luck I came upon the heart note of my Wildings scent as I was parking my car in a picnic area at the foot of a popular mountain-biking track. A sign by the picnic table informs visitors that a cottage once stood on the site, but now all that remains is a long-abandoned outhouse and a collapsed wall, stones crumbling into yellow clay and dust. As I stepped out of my car, I caught a smell I still associate with my mother and the cabinet beneath our bathroom sink: jasmine. I looked around but there was nothing close by as far as I could tell. I laced up my shoes, leaning against the crumbled wall for support, and again the smell of jasmine wafted over me.