Pittosporum tobira 'Variegata'

In Japan they call the shrub tobira, short for tobira no ki, the door tree, because the cut branches were hung in the doorway at Setsubun to turn back demons at the threshold of spring. The broken wood smells rank, which was rather the point: bad spirits, like most of us, would rather not walk through a bad smell. The genus name is kinder and more exact, pitta and sporos, pitch and seed, for the resin that coats the black seeds and glues them to whatever bird carries them off.

You meet none of that at the doorstep. What you meet is the scent of the flowers, pure orange blossom, carried on creamy five-petaled stars clustered at the branch tips through late spring. This is the variegated form, and the foliage is the reason to reach for the plant: oval, leathery, gray-green leaves rimmed in irregular cream, their edges rolled softly under, holding the two-tone all year. By autumn the spent flowers have become small woody capsules that split into three and show a lining of bright orange-red seeds set in that same resinous gloss.

Tough in the way coastal plants are tough, unbothered by salt wind, heat, or a hard shearing, and asking only for sharp drainage and a little sun. A hedge that perfumes the whole garden for a fortnight in spring and stays composed the other fifty weeks of the year. Site the shrub where you pass close by, beside a gate or a door, where the scent can ambush you on the way in.