The Scented Garden

Smelly Flowers

A Read-Along Activity

S61_Header_Wildflower
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Remember the other week when the teddy bears were saying how lovely the roses smelled in their garden? (Click here to read it again). And the bluebells which they had smelled in the woodlands during the Spring? (Click here to read this one again). Well, they began to wonder if there were any other flowers that had pretty fragrances too.

So they decided to check out the other flowers in the garden.

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Boo And Sweet Peas
Boo tested the sweet peas, which are lovely plants which clamber up canes and posts and reach high up into the sky. Their flowers are all sorts of colours - white, pink, violet, purple, etc - and they all smell gorgeous. They are so nice that the bears quite often pick bunches of them to put in vases indoors so that the scent spreads through the whole house. Every time you cut the flowers, even more grow to replace them, so you can have vases of flowers all through the summer.

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Bubbles And Lobelia
Bubbles tested the lobelia they have growing in their hanging baskets but, although the little flowers are bright and colourful, they have no scent.

Boo also tested the violas which live just outside the window in a big pot.

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Boo And Violas
They are very colourful too and their flowers look like little smiley faces, which is why the bears like them so much. The flowers only have a very light fragrance though, according to Boo.

Tommy couldn't really reach his nose up to any of those flowers, even the shorter ones like the violas. Instead, he tested some of the wildflowers growing in the lawn. He discovered that the flowers of the white clover smell beautiful!

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Tommy And Clover
The bears had never thought to smell clover before. They have sat amongst the plants looking for four-leaf clover leaves which are supposedly very rare and very lucky for you if you find one, but had never smelled the flowers. You have to get up really close to the flowers to smell their scent though. Tommy was just the right height to do the testing!!

As they wandered around the garden, Custard accidentally brushed up against some plants in the herb garden.

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Custard And Sage
They had no flowers but when their leaves were gently pressed, they gave off a beautiful scent. Lots of herbs are apparently like that - not only lovely to eat, but lovely to smell too. Rub or press their leaves very gently and check.

Crackers found some alyssum, a small plant with a profusion of pretty, white flowers. He jumped right into the middle of a bunch of them so his nose was buried in their petals. And they smelled lovely - he hoped it rubbed off on him too!!

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Crackers And Alyssum

There are lots of flowers with pretty scents, some of which you can only smell in the evenings, and some of which, as the bears have just discovered, don't even have flowers, just leaves, but they smell lovely too!

Perhaps you could take a trip round your garden, or out in the countryside, and try smelling all the plants you come across. You could even list them in the order of the scents you liked the best! The bears tried to do that, but ended up arguing about whether roses or sweet peas smelled the nicest, though Tommy still insisted that clover was the best!! Be careful though and check for bees before you put your nose anywhere near a flower - they seem to love the smell of them too!!