The saguaro and yucca rely on both flower color and fragrance to insure pollination, and our night gardens may enjoy both these sensual experiences as well. Many other garden plants offer the same characteristics, particularly those which originated in the tropics where scent is an important means of drawing pollen vectors in the riot of jungle vegetation. With limited eyesight, many species of insect will respond to scents over a much larger area than they do visual color. Fragrances in cultivated garden flowers vary in their sweetness and intensity. In some cases the plants mimic pheromones which are the natural sexual attractants of insects and may be too subtle for us to smell.
Musty odors tend to resemble the natural odors of bats.
White for Moonlight Vita Sackville-West was a famous English garden writer who inhabited Sissinghurst Castle earlier in this century. There she would write her books on the third floor of a medieval tower and survey her garden from above. Wandering through its parterre of fine boxwood hedges enclosing every species of white flowering annual and perennial imaginable, it seems rather uninteresting and monotonous. But what few viewers realize is that it was designed by a woman who would look down upon the geometric hedges after dark. Vita often walked her land in the dark conjuring up images for her writing, and it was in a woodland dell that she first saw a white lily made radiant by moonlight on a clear night.