Today (Wednesday) I will complete another circuit around the sun and celebrate my 59th birthday. It is a time for regard and reflection for sure, as I am now able to reach out and touch 60 on the nose. There are too many of my ‘favourite’ people who haven’t made it this far. Dad (Bob) died at 54, my best friend at just 19 and far too many other people, whom I loved and laughed with, won’t have the privilege of seeing out their fifth decade. It is indeed a privilege.

I love Carl Jung’s observation, ‘Most mid-life crises come from trying to live the second part of your life like you did the first.’

I have learned not to. My tolerance for negativity, gossip, and small-talk expired. My circle of friends is very small but perfectly formed. I have learned that gratitude unlocks life.

Joan Rivers summed it up: “I wish I could tell you it gets better but it doesn’t. You do.”

St Catwg’s Church in Llangattock are currently preparing for their Easter Lily Festival by inviting you to dedicate a Lily to a friend or in memory of a loved one. Names will then be written in a Book of Dedications, which will be on display from Easter Sunday.

Each lily costs £7 and payment can be made by bank transfer, with all the necessary details and form for dedications on their website www.llangattockchurch.org/lilies/

You are invited to view the lilies in the church any time from Easter Sunday morning onwards, the wonderful local ‘Lily Ladies’ work hard to create the most striking, poignant and meaningful displays. And of course, the fragrance is just ‘scent-sational’.

I currently have a little vase of hyacinth and narcissi from the garden next to my computer and the scent from those is pretty scent-sational too. It never ceases to amaze me just how much ‘punch’ nature can pack into flowers. And it is a great reminder to remember how important it is to include ‘scent’ in the garden. There are lots of scented shrubs, bulbs, perennials, and even annuals to choose from and with a bit of planning you can easily get fragrant flowers throughout the year, from Daphne bholua and Mahonia japonica in the winter through to scented night stocks as summer bedding. There are the more well known scents like hyacinths, jasmine, lilac, lilies, pinks and roses but also the lesser-known scented beauties like osmanthus and heliotropes.

Sadly a lot of scent is bred out of some plants in preference for longer-lasting blooms and jazzy colours or flower shapes. In most blooms, scent production and length of flower life are tightly linked by a plant hormone called ethylene. In short, ethylene makes a flower produce more scent but at the cost of the length of flowering, as the flowers fade quicker. Less ethylene obviously causes the opposite effect. So many plant breeders, with the best intentions, have made showier, longer-lasting flowers with little or no fragrance.

For many pollinators, the flower’s smell indicates where the plant is and when it's ready to be pollinated, and an extraordinary finding at Kew Gardens showed that some plants even ‘drug’ bees. Citrus and coffee flowers have caffeine in their nectar, which when consumed improves the bees’ memory for those flower scents. This means that bees will recognise these flowers more easily and revisit them more frequently and therefore be more efficient pollinators to these plants.

So whilst flowers that fade a little faster is a small price to pay for the fragrance we enjoy, we need to remember that fragrant flowers weren’t actually designed for us.