pillow talk; In the afterglow of "Sex and the City", Sarah Jessica Parker is proving her might on the silver screen and at the perfume counter.(Interview)

Byline: Robert Sullivan

A good thing about Sarah Jessica Parker is that even though her "life after Sex and the City" is in full swing, she feels that there is time to stop everything and smell the roses. She told the baby-sitter she'd be back by around four-and she'd be lying to you if she said she was happy being away from her good-smelling son-but here, in New Orleans, at the botanical gardens, she is way into smelling the flowers, especially the smelling part. With each expectant breath she luxuriates in the scent of a rose. "Oh, come here, smell this," she keeps saying. Yogic postures are required to reach your nose to the roses.

It's not just the flowers Sarah Jessica loves in New Orleans. She loves New Orleans. She's living in a house in the Garden District. At Whole Foods on Magazine Street, her son in the cart, she even signed a Sex and the City T-shirt on a worker at the checkout counter, to the thrill of the local paper, the Times-Picayune. Her neighbors invite her for Sunday dinners. "I had never been to New Orleans," she says, "and until you see it you don't understand its beauty. The architecture is unbelievable. There's not a house that's not beautiful. It's a city full of incredibly kind people, full of people who really take seriously Southern hospitality."

And of course she loves the food. "Po' boys are so freakin' good," she says as she passes a po' boy stand on the drive over to the gardens.

It's hot, though, and this morning she was feeling the heat as she filmed scenes from Failure to Launch, a comedy with Matthew McConaughey that involves a guy in his 30s who lives at home and uses his parents as cover to keep him from having to commit to a woman, a scheme that begins to fall apart when he meets Sarah Jessica's character. "You wouldn't believe what I was wearing all morning filming a paint-ball fight," she says.

She has also just finished a movie with the working title of The Family Stone, due out this fall, which stars just about everybody-Dermot Mulroney, Claire Danes, Diane Keaton, Luke Wilson, and Rachel McAdams-and is her first role after Carrie Bradshaw.

But now she's cool as she strolls the gardens, down the secret rows, past test roses, into the old hothouse, the wet humid home to the orchids. "You know, I am good with orchids, and I don't really know why," she says. Yes, Sarah Jessica is proving herself to be a little infatuated by scents and smells, not to mention good at explaining them. "Oh, dark-blue Lily of the Nile," she says, sniffing. Another rose-but it does not satisfy. "This one's more classic rose, and it's a higher note," she says. "It's more green-smelling than the other one. It would smell nice after you took a shower."