Arty's Garden: Include Fragrant Flowers in Your Garden Design

Originally published in the Nov. 13, 2013, issue

 

If you choose flowers for your garden solely on how they look, shame on you – fragrant flowers are one of the delights of having a nose! In Georgia we are fortunate to be able to grow a wide assortment of olfactory-pleasing flowers.

Floral fragrance can be sweet, bitter, sour, spicy, fruity, pungent, combinations of these and more. There are even a few, such as some of the arums, with fragrances that are not so pleasant, but are interesting to grow nonetheless.

Fragrance can be subjective. What pleases one person another may find heavy and cloying. It is possible to like a fragrance outdoors, but be overpowered by it after several hours in a closed room. While pungent marigolds are not to everyone’s liking, on hot summer days they can be refreshing. Some people dislike the hard, lemony fragrance of a Southern magnolia, but it smells like summer to me.

Banana shrub

Fragrance may vary with the time of day. Banana shrub has little fragrance in the morning, but smells like banana Popsicles in the afternoon. Sweet-bubby bush is usually scentless in the a.m., but in the warmth of an April afternoon releases an enigmatic fragrance that may be a mix of apples, cantaloupes, strawberries and spices. Four-o-clocks, night-blooming jasmine, hardy ginger, nicotiana and petunias are flowers that don’t release much or, in some cases, any fragrance until evening. Don’t decide against one just because you are shopping at a garden center in the morning.

In addition to those I’ve already mentioned, here are a few more fragrant shrubs, trees, vines, annuals and perennials to consider: gardenia, wintersweet, witch-hazel, winter daphne, winter honeysuckle or sweet-breath-of-spring, Carolina jessamine, mock orange, Korean spice viburnum, fragrant snowball, sweet bay magnolia, Japanese flowering apricot, Alabama azalea, sweet azalea, pinxterbloom azalea, swamp azalea, tea olive, narcissus, snapdragon, night-blooming jasmine, mock orange, tuberose, hardy ginger or butterfly ginger, cottage pinks or perennial dianthus, bearded iris, phlox, peony, stock, old-fashioned petunia and flowering tobacco or nicotiana.

Many roses are fragrant, especially old varieties like Blanc Double de Coubert and Souvenir de la Malmaison, but many newer varieties such as Double Delight, Mr. Lincoln, Scentimental, Memorial Day, Gertrude Jekyll and Fragrant Cloud are also known for their fragrances.

It’s impossible for me to select one favorite fragrant flower. A good rose is hard to beat, and I am especially fond of the luscious, yet slightly peppery, gardenia in the summer, the apricot-like fragrance of tea olive in the fall, Carolina jessamine and sweet-bubby in the spring and witch-hazel in the winter. A horticulturist at your nursery or garden center can help you with your choices so you will have fragrance through the year.

If you are really into having a fragrant garden, also consider plants with fragrant leaves such as scented geraniums and herbs. That will be a topic for another day.

Arty Schronce is the Department’s resident gardening expert. He’s a lifelong gardener and a horticulture graduate of North Carolina State University who encourages everyone to discover the pleasures of plants and gardening.