Summer’s dwindling symphony of bloom was a treat to the eyes despite the record-breaking heat, but if you like a pleasant whiff to go with your sights, you likely were disappointed.
That’s because relative few of our commonly used landscape plants have any fragrance.
It’s entirely possible to have a yard full of flowers that looks like it should smell divine but actually delivers zippo scents.
One reason is that many yard-owners have planted for low maintenance, which has resulted in yards laden with scentless (albeit hard-to-kill) ornamental grasses, yew bushes, daylilies, and barberries.
Another reason is that fragrance has been the odd trait out in growers’ plant selection over the last few decades.
Breeders have come up with all sorts of great new introductions lately that bloom bigger and longer, grow more compactly, fight off disease, and generally slough off most troubles better than yesteryear’s plants.
The problem is that it’s hard to breed or discover a plant that’s perfect in every way. So growers end up having to sacrifice one or more factors to get the ones that are most important.
Fragrance is nice, but it tends to fall lower on the must-have list than, say, low care, being hard to kill, and not being a dinner favorite of deer.
That doesn’t mean fragrant gardens have to be a forgotten page of Grandma’s memory. There really are some good choices still out there if fragrance matters.
If you visited this year’s Mediterranean-themed Philadelphia Flower Show, you likely noticed that fragrance is very possible – if you plan for it and pick the right plants.
While we can’t grow the citrus trees that were so sweetly fragrant at the 2020 Flower Show, we can grow a lot else.
Old-fashioned nicotiana flowers are some of the most fragrant flowers.
Some, such as old-fashioned flowering tobacco (Nicotiana sylvestris), lilacs, and mock oranges, spew wonderful scents all over the yard with no prompting.
Others, such as scented geraniums, lavender, and rosemary, have more subtle scents that require you to brush against them or to bend over and take a sniff.
If you’d like to add more fragrance to your nasally blah yard, just make sure you actually like the scents of the plants you’re planning to plant.
Not everyone senses smells the same way.
Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit scientific institute specializing in taste and smell research, found in a 2019 study that genetic differences in just one of the 400 scent receptors we have in our noses can drastically change how we sense and describe a smell.
“Because most odors activate several receptors, many scientists thought that losing one receptor wouldn’t make a difference in how we perceive that odor,” said Monell’s lead researcher on the study, Dr. Joel Mainland. “Instead, our work shows that is not the case and that changes to a single receptor can make a big difference in how you perceive an odor.”
That explains why some people, for instance, love what they call the “strong sweet scent” of paperwhite bulbs while others think they reek of burning rubber.
Some people like the scent of paperwhite bulbs. Others think the flowers smell like burnt rubber.
Other Monell research has found that reaction to different scents has a psychological connection.
If your beloved Grandma, for example, went on walks through her lavender patch with you as child, the mere scent of a lavender plant might generate pleasant memories. But if Mom whacked you with a switch of lavender to get you to eat your Brussels sprouts, you might rue the odor to this day.
Point: Beauty is in the nose of the beholder.
If you can’t get a whiff of a plant at the time you’re buying, do some “homework-sniffing” ahead of time in neighbors’ yards or at public gardens. Then make note of the species and particular variety because sometimes one variety of, say, honeysuckle, will smell great but another variety will have no scent.
Also realize that plant scents can vary based on how hot or cold it is, whether there’s a breeze blowing or not, and even time of day. Flowers that depend on attracting nighttime pollinators, for example, have a stronger scent after dark than in the middle of the day.
When you find scented plants that appeal to you, resist the seemingly logical urge to pack them all together in one “fragrance garden” – especially if most of the plants are going to bloom at the same time.
All of these odors may blend together in one unrecognizable mess, kind of like a cake with a few too many ingredients.
A better way to scent a yard is to scatter both the placement of the fragrant plants and their bloom times. This way you’ll have little fragrant surprises all over, ideally from early spring until winter freezes everything out.
Place your “smelly-goods” along walkways, near door entrances, around patios and benches, and next to windows where a breeze will carry favorite plant scents into the house on warm evenings.
With that in mind, here are my 10 favorite fragrant plants, followed by a list of some others you might consider:
Hyacinths are some of the sweetest-smelling spring bulbs.
1.) Dutch hyacinths. These April-blooming bulbs put out fat spikes of purple, blue, pink, rose, white, or yellow. Most are strongly perfumed and waft readily – no brushing-against needed.
2.) Polianthes tuberosa. Sometimes called “tuber rose,” this plant isn’t a rose at all but a tender bulb that some people consider to be the most fragrant of anything big or small. It grows only a foot or so tall and produces white flowers throughout summer. Try one in a pot.
Most dwarf lilacs, such as this 'Tinkerbelle' variety, are highly fragrant.
3.) Dwarf lilac. Most of these are just as fragrant as the bigger, older French lilacs but bloom heavier and on more compact five- to six-foot plants. ‘Miss Kim,’ ‘Tinkerbelle,’ and dwarf Korean lilacs are three of my favorites.
Korean spice viburnum flowers are fragrant in May, left, and then the leaves turn burgundy in fall.
4.) Korean spice viburnum. Most viburnums smell pretty good when they bloom in May, but Korean spice types have them all beat (except maybe for Judd viburnums). These six-footers also have very nice deep-maroon fall foliage.
5.) Roses. Lots of roses have little to no scent, but lots more range from “gently sweet” to “amazingly powerful.” The David Austin English-rose line is at least mildly fragrant across the board, but some other standouts include ‘Double Delight,’ ‘Perfume Delight,’ ‘Frederic Mistral,’ ‘Miss All-American Beauty,’ ‘Mister Lincoln,’ ‘Honey Perfume,’ ‘Memorial Day,’ and ‘Tiffany.’
Oriental lilies, such as this 'Stargazer' variety, are among the most fragrant flowers.
6.) Oriental lily. This type of hardy, summer-blooming lily has the sweetest, strongest fragrance of any lily type. The big, trumpet-shaped, downward-facing flowers bloom in July and August and come in a variety of colors. The old-fashioned white ‘Casablanca’ and rosy bi-color ‘Stargazer’ are two of the best known and still scented winners.
Orienpet lilies (a cross of Oriental and trumpet types) also are very fragrant.
The herb rosemary has a piney scent when you rub against the leaves.
7.) Rosemary. This fine-leafed herb grows in a little bush that’s strongly pine-scented when you rub the branches. We’re a little too cold in winter to grow it as a perennial, but it’s fragrant enough to warrant buying new each spring.
Lavender, such as this 'Phenomenal' variety, has fragrant flowers and leaves.
8.) Lavender. This silvery-leafed herb is plenty winter-hardy, so long as you give it excellent drainage. It has its own distinct scent (citrusy-pine?) and blooms nicely in purple.
The flowers of sweet box might be small, but they're powerfully scented.
9.) Sweet box. This trailing, two-foot-tall broadleaf evergreen makes a nice shady groundcover. Its little white, early-spring flowers are barely visible underneath the foliage, but the sweet scent carries readily, creating the mystery, “Where is that scent coming from?”
10.) Jasmine vine. Jasmine vine is a glossy-leafed, tropical vine whose masses of dainty white flowers are sweetly fragrant all summer. We can’t grow it year-round as a hardy vine like Southerners can, but we can grow it as an annual vine and then cut it back, pot it up, and overwinter it as a houseplant.
If you’re OK with that regimen, also look into gardenia.
More smell-gooders:
Trees: most magnolias, some apples and crabapples, cedar, juniper, pine, flowering cherry, Japanese snowbell, some crape myrtles.
Clethra is nicknamed "summersweet" for good reason.
Shrubs: mock orange, witch hazel, daphne, summersweet (Clethra alnifolia), sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus), Virginia sweetspire, bayberry, some honeysuckles.
Perennials: agastache, peony, some iris, some hosta, santolina, carnation, evening primrose, oregano, catmint, Russian sage, mint (best grown in root-containing pots), some phlox, sweet woodruff.
Annuals: flowering tobacco (Nicotiana), some heliotropes, scented geraniums, sweet pea, lemon thyme, sweet alyssum, basil, night-scented stock, and some petunias, pansies, and violas.
Bulbs: Jonquilla, Poeticus and Tazetta types of daffodils, some tulips, freesia.
P.S.: I’d also pick the evergreen shrub tea olive (Osmanthus fragrans), if it were hardy in our Zone 6 climate. Its white flowers are wonderfully fragrant in spring.
Read more about fragrance in the garden in Ken Druse’s new book called “The Scentual Garden” (Harry N. Abrams, 2019, $50 hardcover).
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September 03, 2020 at 06:33PM
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