Round Robin: Sweet Scent of Cistus

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NEWBERG, Oregon—With the summer heat, I find a walk through the herb garden and perennial borders a heady experience. The air is filled with scents and I dodge buzzing bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. Old species roses and lavenders are the most recognizable scents and seem to be the most frequented by pollinators, but I have planted a few herbal surprises in among them. These are the aromatic Cistus species, or rockroses. They love the sun and are drought tolerant. I grow C. ladanifer, C. incanus, and C. ¥ purpureus (a hybrid of the first two). They are all a source of labdanum—a heavily scented resin used as a perfume fixative for soaps, deodorants and cosmetics. In the Mediterrean region, the gummy resin used to be harvested from browsing goats: the resin would stick to their beards, which the shepherds then cut off with goat-horn-handled curved knives. I can only imagine the indignity that some old billy goat must have endured until his beard grew back.

C. ladanifer, which has beautiful, single-petaled white flowers with five dark maroon blotches around a yellow center, was the first rockrose that I ever grew. The dark evergreen leaves contrast well with the flowers but become quite sticky as the plant exudes more of its gummy resin in the summer heat. (The resin reportedly has insecticidal properties as well.) When cold weather arrives, the resin turns opaque. Being evergreen, our C. ladanifer has a presence in the winter herb garden; it’s carefree and winter-hardy as long as it has good drainage. It is covered with a delicate, almost crepe paper–like bloom most of the summer although individual flowers last barely a day. C. incanus has warm rose-pink flowers that blend well with my agastache hybrids from Mexico. C. ¥ purpureus has bright magenta flowers with maroon splotches that are highlighted by the silver-leaved artemisias and the warm blues of Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’ and N. grandiflora.

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