Cestrum nocturnum?

One of the last times I saw Gavin Scobie, a couple of decades ago now, he was walking by the wild fennel in Centennial Park--not that far from the wild cestrum. Years later my boyfriend found a tiny sucker of that cestrum, and it did take root. Was it Cestrum nocturnum? I'm not sure. There are cestrums and cestrums. Some have greener flowers and some more of an orange or yellowish colour. I'm not a botanist. You see the odd cestrum around Parkes and Forbes, NSW, surviving abandoned in very hot dry conditions. I wouldn't know what sort they are, or how they got there in the first place.

There was once a cestrum growing--all green-flowered--in a tiny postage-stamp backyard in Victoria Street, Potts Point. Possibly from a bird's dropping. The landlady told me her friend said it was a ''jasmine''. Cestrum, with its toxicity, is certainly not a jasmine, but it has been called ''Jessamine'', so clearly someone's wires were a little crossed. Of course, jasmine are not toxic, and we like to sip jasmine tea--so fragrant and cooling.

You have to credit those wild cestrums, though. So very tough and drought-resistant. Beautiful fragrant flowers. Clive Blazey, in his Digger's Seeds catalogue, said he smelled the most wondrous and enchanting fragrance on the isle of Rhodes--or was it Crete? It turned out to be Cestrum nocturnum. Well, they do have a beautiful nocturnal scent. Nothing like the scent of Cestrum nocturnum wafting up into your window, at night-time. Seems especially strong after rain, too. So sexy, if a perfume can be described so. Intoxicating. I think it's related to other night-scented members of the Nightshade family--like petunias, night-scented tobacco, and four-o'clock flowers.

I love Four-o'clock flowers. It's fantastic and amusing how they open up reliably, every afternoon, at four-o'clock--all depending on daylight saving, of course. I especially like the self-sown harlequin ones that survive around hot summer pavements in Paddington and Darlinghurst. Like cestrums, they tend to smell especially nice and fresh after the rain. They are very easy to grow from seed. Very sexy and beautiful scent--very evocative, and aphrodesiac, on hot summer nights. They are quite tough, but will need extra water in the hottest and dryest of conditions. They come up year after year, from the tuberous root they form.