Finally, he hands back my pass. “You should get a new picture.”
I laugh nervously. “Right, I’ll do that.” The picture on the pass was taken when I was eleven. “Have a nice day.”
Once inside, I take in the millions of scents around me. I filter out all the animal odors and focus on the plants, which resonate at higher frequencies in my nose.
Court opens a brochure with a garden map, spreading it out before him like a tourist. The garden is divided into seven pie-shaped sections, one for each continent, with specialty gardens sprinkled throughout. The Children’s Garden sits in the middle of the pizza, boasting a grassy field for running around, trees for climbing, and edible plants. I point at a small patch at the top of the Children’s Garden labeled Ancient Plants. “This one. Follow me.”
We travel down a gravelly path shaded by flowering dogwood that has a powdery fragrance, like a baby’s nursery. Court,still looking at the brochure, whistles. “Mesozoic epoch? So my mom smells like dinosaurs?”
I chuckle. “Not quite. The plants here are like living fossils. They’re resilient to pollutants, meaning they contain the truest core of scent. We all have a touch of the ancients in us.”
I don’t tell him that much of what we know about plants, especially the Ancients, is due to the effort of aromateurs, who believed that plants should be studied for themselves, not just for medicinal uses. It would sound like bragging. The textbooks say that Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, founded what we call botany, but aromateurs had been categorizing plants for thousands of years before he was even born.
The amused animal cracker smell drifts from Court. “I had no idea plants could be so . . . cool.”
A zing of nervous energy travels through me at the possibility that he could be talking about me, and not the plants. I laugh nervously and walk faster. The banksia gives way to bitter cherry trees. The leaves could substitute for two of Alice’s notes. I stare up at the branches. Just out of arm’s reach.
Court glances back at me. He stretches up for a branch. I jerk my thumb up. Higher. He lifts his heels and touches a slim branch, heavy with dark leaves. I nod.
He checks that nobody’s watching then plucks off a handful. I stuff them into my bag.
“Why do I feel guilty about that?” he whispers.
“I heard it gets easier.”
As we travel farther into the garden, we see more people, mostly senior citizens and kids on field trips. I let my nose guide us to Australia where I harvest kangaroo paw.
We cross a bridge lined on either side with planters of purple coneflowers. I stick my nose in the planters then quickly jerk away from its cloying grape scent.
Court notices my reaction, and carefully sniffs at the coneflowers. “Something wrong with them?”
“No, they just remind me of this time when I was five and ate through a whole quart of Mother’s preserves. She was so mad, she cracked a spoon on the counter.”
Emotional memories love to piggyback onto smells. Aromateurs have a saying, “Do not linger in the garden of memories, for there are many traps.”
“I did that with my mom’s lemon bars once. But that was only a month ago.” He flashes me a grin, rousing one out of me. Then, with a mischievous quirk of his eyebrow, he tucks the flower behind his ear. “If I wear this all day, maybe you won’t feel so bad next time you smell it.”
His goofy gesture melts me like cocoa butter in the sun. Even my bones feel gooey and I pour myself, rather than walk, down the grassy pathway.
The sound of children laughing and yelling intensifies as we draw closer to the Ancients. A Frisbee whizzes one way, while a soccer ball flies in another direction. There must be at least fifty kids in the Children’s Garden today, smelling like grubby handsand sock lint. Many of them are wandering from the grassy field into the Ancients. I pause by a statue of a half-naked woman and survey the under-five-foot crowd. Court shoots me a quizzical glance.
“Maybe they’ll leave soon,” I say, scratching my elbows.
He bends close to my ear. “How many more plants do you need?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Are they all in the Ancients?”
“I hope so.”
Below an engraved wooden sign that reads, “Ancient Plant Garden, Welcome to the Past,” a group of eight- or nine-year-old boys cluster around a rare hellebore shrub, watching a kid in a Camp Snoopy T-shirt pluck off the delicate pink sepals. Children are often attracted to hellebores because of their primitive glands containing sugar that give off a taffy-like note.
I drift closer and sniff. “That one’s a match for one of your mom’s heart notes,” I tell Court.
Out of nowhere, a soccer ball careens toward us like a meteorite. I gasp as something gray streaks past me.
Court traps the ball with his chest, letting it thump down against his thigh, then roll to his foot. Behind him, the hellebores remain unscathed, save for a few missing petals.
