Sweetness in the spice

Sit on the porch for a minute at dusk and the first thing you notice is the air, heavy as a fat hand in a hot, wet glove, squeezing your body.

The second is much more pleasant: Scents of spice and sweetness, even though our jasmines haven't started to bloom yet.

The piquancy, I think, comes from the Bahama firebush, which gives an Old Spice note. The sweet is . . . well, so sweet. Almost iris, and with no "common" name, hard to remember as Stemmadenia litoralis.

The place it holds had been assigned to a triple palm in the plan by Craig, our landscape architect. But like all architects, he neglected to note the plumbing lines and roots and other artifacts in the real world; so Jon, our landscaper, brought in the Stemma, all 7 feet or so of it. Craug called it a gardenia on steroids -- but gardenias are fleshy, and this is far from.

It's qualified as a rarity, and its only drawback is that it blooms so much that the ground under it is littered with spent flowers. The blossoms themselves have petals delicate as the membranes you peel from Easter eggs. And the buds are too phallic for description.

I'm not sending it back.