These are the true jasmines, the olive-family climbers and scramblers whose name has been borrowed by half a dozen unrelated plants precisely because the scent is worth stealing. Jasminum officinale, the poet's jasmine, and the large-flowered grandiflorum, the Spanish jasmine of perfumery, hang the warm evening with a fragrance you catch mid-stride before you find the source. Site a plant near a door, or a window left open on a June night, and the whole house will know.

Not every jasmine trades on perfume. Jasminum nudiflorum, the winter jasmine, spends no scent at all and instead throws bare yellow stars along green whips in the dead of the cold season, when almost nothing else will. The group runs from twining vines to loose, arching shrubs, most of them quick, forgiving, and happy to clothe a fence or spill down a bank.