Twenty-seven roses. That’s how many blooms tumbled out of my purse when I got home, each a different variety, all richly fragrant. My car smelled of roses. My office smelled of roses. I’d just gotten back from Independence, Texas, home of the Antique Rose Emporium.

A busy fall delayed my visit to the eight acres of display gardens — the roses peak in April and October — but it’s been a warm November and when I arrived the beds were still alive with migrating butterflies and fat bees storing up the last of the season’s pollen. Mike Shoup, the Emporium’s cheerful, bearded owner (shown above right), toured me around the different gardens, including one expressly for the many weddings the Emporium hosts. The goal, he explained, was to show people how they could integrate old roses (a loose term for varieties at least fifty years old, sometimes much older) into their gardens. It was all very pretty. But I wasn’t there for gardening inspiration. I was there to smell the roses.

I explained my purpose — and Now Smell This — to Mike as best I could. “Oh that’s great!” he said. “I think fragrance is one of the most important things about the roses, but it’s so hard to talk about.” Then he recommended The Emperor of Scent, Chandler Burr’s book on biophysicist and perfume critic Luca Turin, and I knew I’d found a fellow scent fanatic…

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