THE plants to place beside a path where you walk in winter, when their scent will hit you every time you pass by. They make a thicket of stems with glossy leaves, and have insignificantly small creamy flowers, eventually replaced by small, round, black fruit, red in one species. But those flowers are not insignificant - they produce that wonderful scent, in abundance, for many weeks.

Sarcococca confusa is the biggest of the species normally encountered, with glossy, deep green, wavy leaves, bigger than in other species, up to 5 cm long. It has sweetly scented, creamy-white flowers followed by glossy black fruit.