Now is the time of year to be indulging in floral scents. In winter, lavender is an acceptable floral fragrance but now that roses are in bloom and summer is almost upon us, I am reaching on my dressing table for lighter fragrances — lily of the valley and rose and violet and jasmine. Each brings back memories of where I acquired it, or of someone whose fragrance it was when I first found I liked it.

Though she was fondly nicknamed Rosebud, it was violet that was my paternal grandmother’s pet fragrance. On summer evenings, when there were still sufficient bluffs at Oak Bluffs to have a park bench there, she was sure to be on it. She would watch the sun go down and wave to passing boats with a scarf scented with violet. Of course the fragrance never reached the travelers on passing steamers but it did reach me, sitting beside her at the end of Arlington avenue. And so, on warm summer evenings, I am likely to put dabs of violet from my dressing table behind my ears. Then I fondly remember my grandmother and the bluffs that are almost gone.

The flower from which the perfume comes was once the Greek nymph, Io, beloved of Zeus, the king of the gods, a book of wildflower lore tells me. Io was turned into a tiny, fragrant violet by Zeus to protect her from his jealous goddess wife, Hera. The few wild violets of spring that grow here and there on the Vineyard are now long gone but I am reminded by my bottle of Les Fleurs de Provence Violette of that French province where I first acquired it.

The lilies of the valley are now gone, too, but in early spring I have often found them on Island walks. There is a fine patch on Middle Road in West Tisbury and I have rare pink ones in my garden, transplanted from the late Henry Beetle and Elizabeth Bowie Hough’s Edgartown garden.

The lilacs that grow at my front door are long gone now, too, but I have lilac eau de cologne on my dressing table. It was a purchase on a visit to Nantucket some years ago, so I think of Nantucket when I wear it.

And then there is jasmine, a flower of warm countries. It was on a hillside in Tunisia that I first smelled its delicate white flower. Later, in restaurants there , vendors of jasmine were going from table to table selling jasmine bouquets. In Egypt, Egyptian friends tell me, jasmine is always considered an appropriate springtime gift for young girls.

Here on the Vineyard, the little wild roses that were planted to separate field from field in the 1950s are in bloom, their fragrance perfuming up-Island. Rosa rugosa perfume is in the air, too. And in Edgartown, of course, the scent of fence roses abounds.

On my dressing table I have a tiny wooden minaret with a slender bottle inside. Though it has long been empty, it still smells fragrant. It comes from the Valley of the Roses in Bulgaria where I was once at rose harvesting time. There, the fields were filled with women picking red Damask roses for attar of roses.

I have never understood why, nowadays, new American roses are being grown only for beauty, with all thought of fragrance long gone. Why can’t there still be the perfume of sweet-smelling American roses on my dressing table?