The Fragrant Drive297 Miles
You have to smell this one here!” Jana Pirtle calls out. The Scentimental rose has candy cane–striped petals, and its intensely sweet fragrance hangs in the air like a blast of perfume at the mall. Pirtle, the horticulturist who oversees the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden, has a soft spot for such floribundas, whose blooms spray forth from the end of a stem in bunches instead of as individual, perfect flowers. A hybrid tea rose nearby offers a more delicate, fruity scent, like a bowl of raspberries.
Smell doesn’t get enough play when we travel, with hilltop views and all stealing attention from the scents. And Texas offers plenty of them to take in, from the aroma of pit-smoked meat in the Hill Country to the singular piquancy of feedlots in the Panhandle. I’d come to East Texas to investigate a hunch that the region is a kind of garden of olfactory delights, perhaps the most pleasantly perfumed part of the state.
Tyler, which bills itself as the rose capital of America, produced more than half of the country’s roses in the forties and fifties, after a blight decimated the local peach industry in the early twentieth century. On street corners all over town, farmers set up honor stands, where motorists could grab a dozen cut roses from a wooden cart and drop fifty cents into a jar.
The Tyler Rose Garden in May.
But it was another claim to fame that initially lured me here: a line of laundry detergent made by the Tyler Candle Company that has become a sensation on TikTok and, in turn, among the New York fashion elite. I, too, got addicted to the intoxicating Diva (“a warm and complex fragrance overflowing with delicious fruits and rich florals”) and Cowboy (“loaded with the rugged aroma of leather”) scents. After contacting the company I was told that the doors of its factory would be closed to me “for insurance reasons,” so instead I set out on an East Texas road trip, exploring nose first.
I drive south on U.S. 69 then on FM Road 747 through lush pastures and impossibly dense stands of pine toward I. D. Fairchild State Forest to meet Jason Ellis. The district forester for the Texas A&M Forest Service spends his days in the Piney Woods, where his favorite smell isn’t floral but elemental: the smoky, resinous scent of a prescribed burn. “Fire used to roam the landscape,” he says. “You’d get lightning strikes in the summer, and fires would burn for months.” His burns attempt to accomplish what those fires did, keeping the understory in check by knocking back yaupon and wax myrtle and thinning out young sweet gum and other hardwoods before they crowd out everything else.
We bump along a dirt track through a stand of loblolly and shortleaf pines, the air in the cab of his truck carrying an acrid trace of last week’s burn, until we arrive at a log that’s still smoldering. The pines rise straight up around us, eighty, ninety, one hundred feet tall. Ellis, a former Texas Army National Guardsman who’s built like a fire hydrant, moves through the forest with ease. He points out small details as we make our way on foot: roosting cavities for the threatened red-cockaded woodpecker; a stretch of ground where he once found the remains of an old sawmill; white marks on trees denoting eleven miles of primitive horseback-and-hiking trails. A thick carpet of fallen needles cushions the ground underfoot. The air gets cooler the deeper you go into the forest, and the crisp, almost medicinal scent of pine cuts through the humidity. By the time we head back toward the road, the light has begun to soften, the long shadows darkening the canyons between the trees.
I head southeast, toward Nacogdoches, which calls itself the garden capital of Texas. (Every town in this region seems to be the capital of something.) David Creech, the director of SFA Gardens at Stephen F. Austin State University, has been building the gardens on campus since 1985. The result is less a single destination than a patchwork of environments spread across 138 acres, connected by some seven miles of trails. In the Ruby M. Mize Azalea Garden, thousands of azaleas bloom at once, with some varieties returning for a second show in the summer. A few even carry a sweet, pineapple-like aroma. “People say, ‘Where can I get one?’ But you can’t,” Creech says. Hydrangeas and gardenias dominate the Gayla Mize Garden in the summer, and myriad ferns crowd the forest floor in a part of the Mast Arboretum that looks more like a Pacific Northwest rainforest than anything you’d expect to find in Texas.
The Fredonia Hotel, in Nacogdoches; in bloom at the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden; an aerial view between Tyler and Nacogdoches.
But Creech’s favorite corner is the Pineywoods Native Plant Center. Outside the greenhouse complex, a magnolia tree in full bloom broadcasts its dense perfume near a stand of hardwood trees—hickory, elm, hawthorn, red oak, post oak—their leaves rattling in the breeze. Inside the greenhouse, the hot, damp air hits like a wall, alive with the primal smells of soil and vegetation.
Heading north to Caddo Lake on Texas Highway 259 and then on Texas Highway 315, manicured gardens give way to a landscape of rolling pastures and deep green forests and ultimately to the mysteries of bayou country. Will Johnson, the son of a longtime local waterman and the owner of Johnsons Ranch Marina—widely believed to be the oldest inland marina in Texas—meets me at the rickety dock outside his tin-roofed shop, which sells beer and bait. He leads me to a modified pontoon boat fitted with a mud motor and built to handle the shallows. A mudtoon, they call it here, or a swamptoon. We idle out into the largest bald cypress forest in the world, where the trees rise straight out of the lake and great beards of Spanish moss brush the surface. The air here offers a deep marine musk that envelops everything around it.
The motor drones, the beards swing, and then, through a narrow passage and around a bend, Johnson cuts the motor and drifts us into a cove where white lotus flowers spread across the dark surface. Their scent is softer than the environment, creamy sweet with an upper register that floats above the darker base notes of the swamp, a kind of olfactory duet playing only for those who lean over the edge and take it in.
The next morning starts gray and slow. I return to Tyler to meet the people behind what may be the best-smelling operation in town. Not the candle company, alas, but David Austin Roses, founded by the English breeder who’s become synonymous with a certain idea of the perfect English garden and whose U.S. headquarters are run out of a warehouse near the Tyler airport. There are no flower fields here. Rose plants arrive from points west as bare roots and stems and lie dormant on metal racks in cold storage rooms, waiting to be distributed to nurseries across the country. Locally, the nearly one-hundred-year-old Breedlove Nursery & Landscape carries dozens of David Austin varieties, from the pale yellow Charles Darwin, which smells of tea, to the spicier, sweeter apricot-orange fragrance of Carding Mill.
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General manager Michael Johnson shows me a handful of plants he’s growing from bare root with plans to ship directly to consumers. The flowers are fuller than a supermarket rose, their petals unfolding in dense, excessive formations. And the scents—my God, the scents, like the rush of citrus from the yellow-blossomed Poet’s Wife—are assertive to a point of immodesty, too forward for something so thoroughly English.
I had driven around looking for a kind of scent terroir, some unifying explanation for why this corner of Texas produces such vivid smells. I didn’t find one, exactly. What I discovered instead was a way of following the senses, of being fully present in a place—letting one smell lead to the next, each one pulling me a little farther from where I thought I was going.
Service Stations
The Fredonia Hotel (rates start at $159 a night) is a meticulously renovated mid-century hotel in Nacogdoches. In Jefferson, a town that calls itself (wait for it) the bed-and-breakfast capital of Texas, I woke up to the smells of bacon and coffee at the White Oak Manor ($115 and up a night).
Pitmasters here tend to burn pecan and hickory for a richer, nuttier smoke. Stanley’s Famous Pit Barbecue ships in mesquite, giving the air a sharp bite and calling to mind dry desert nights more than the subtropical climate of the Piney Woods. The Mother Clucker sandwich demands a postmeal nap.
An abbreviated version of this article originally appeared in the July 2026 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Scent Strip.” Subscribe today.
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