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Stand by a riverbank or damp meadow in August and you may catch it before you see it — a warm, sweet, faintly almond scent drifting on the air that is like nothing else in the British countryside. Look for the tall, frothy, cream-white flower heads nodding above the vegetation, and you’ve found meadowsweet: one of the most beautiful, most fragrant and most historically significant wildflowers in these islands.

Walk past a lavender hedge on a warm July afternoon — brush your hand through it as you pass — and something happens that is difficult to explain rationally. The tension drops out of your shoulders. You breathe differently. It is one of those rare plants that seems to act on the nervous system almost before you’ve consciously registered the scent.

There is something almost theatrical about borage. It arrives in the garden in late spring — a little rough around the edges, with coarse hairy leaves and an ungainly habit — and then one morning it opens its flowers and everything is forgiven. Five perfect star-shaped petals of the most extraordinary blue: not the washed-out blue of a summer sky, but a deep, saturated, almost electric cobalt that stops you in your tracks. You may have noticed that our logo is a borage flower

There is a moment in late May — blink and you’ll miss it — when the hedgerows along Hertfordshire’s country lanes seem to exhale. Great flat-topped clouds of creamy white blossom appear almost overnight, filling the warm air with a scent that is floral, honeyed, and unmistakably, gloriously English. That’s elder. And if you’re not already on first-name terms with it, now is the time to be introduced.