Add an extra dimension and bring new delight to your garden by adding scented flowers.
Fragrant flowers add to the ambiance of your garden. Smell is the sense most closely linked with memory, so start creating new memories by adding a few fragrant blooms this year.
Roses For All
Roses are likely the first flower one might think of when a scented garden is desired.
Two new rose varieties to add to your garden include Rose Sweet Mademoiselle and Brindabella Roses™. Sweet Mademoiselle has excellent parentage with an exquisite fragrance that is an enticing blend of fruit and lemon. Expect abundant and continuous blooms on vigorous plants that exhibit excellent disease resistance for their type. The Brindabella Roses™ deliver old-fashioned scent with show-stopping flowers. These roses have a bushy growth habit, excellent disease resistance, and fragrant double flowers in an array of traditional and modern colors. Learn more about the history, classifications and growing of roses in our Year of the Rose information.
Lavender Love
If roses are the first plant of choice for scent, then lavender is a very close second.
Today’s popularity of lavender-scented products (lotions, sleep-aids, oils, cleaning products, etc.) means that it’s an in-demand product among gardeners. Blue Spear is a very showy English lavender with big, tall spikes and more upright flower stems for huge impact. It attracts bees and butterflies, while also being deer and rabbit resistant. Lavandula Blue Torch is a fast-growing tender perennial with finely cut silvery-grey oregano-scented foliage. Stems grow up to 23 inches topped by attractive 2.5 in. flower spikes.
Fragrant Shrubs
Shrubs are excellent choices to give structure in the garden and many are major scent providers as well.
Two new shrubs to add this year include Butterfly Bush Grand Cascade and Vitex x ‘PIIVAC-III’ PPAF (Vitex Chastetree First Editions Flip Side™)! Grand Cascade has major flower power! The blooms have a gentle downward curve, giving it a totally different look. The honey-scented flower panicles are enormous at 12 to 14 inches long and 4 inches wide, making them highly visible to both humans and pollinators alike.
Vitex x ‘PIIVAC-III’ PPAF Flip Side™ is cloaked in 8-inch panicles of fragrant, deep purple flowers. It’s also a strong rebloomer. Flip Side™ got its name because the greyish olive-green leaves are dusky purple on the lower surface. This is a very cool plant for warmer regions.
Try Something New
There are many different varieties that have a fragrance…
Fields of Gold Oriental Asiatic lily flaunts a dark edge surrounding the pale yellow petals with darker yellow centers and dark accent freckles! The fragrance makes this an attention-getter. Snapdragon Chantilly Mix series is a real eye-catcher with large open-faced blooms. Chantilly transports you back to a time when flowers offered a fresh scent. This mix includes shades of orange, pink, purple, white and yellow. Read more about the Year of the Snapdragon.
Unexpected places…
Herbs and vegetables can add an amazing scent to the garden!
Dolce Fresca basil produces sweet tender leaves that maintain an attractive, compact shape that’s both versatile and beautiful. Use the leaves as you would any Genovese basil and it makes an excellent pesto. Teddy dill is a productive slow-bolting dill with full, dense leaf shape. Compact spirals of thick leaflets surround each stem, unlike in most dill varieties, which have finer and more delicate leaves.
Geraniums, the scent of yesterday year
Sometimes just a whiff of a certain flower will bring back memories; geraniums have a way of doing just that. With the new Calliope®series, you get fragrance plus the number one geranium for color and performance. Its vigorous habit makes it ideal for high impact containers where the maximum flower power and wow factors are desired. Five new varieties to look for include: Geranium Calliope® Large Dark Red, Geranium Calliope® Large Hot Rose, Geranium Calliope® Medium Light Lavender, Geranium Calliope® Medium Rose Mega Splash and Geranium Pretty Little™ Pink Splash
Delight your nose by bringing fragrance to your garden!
“This post is provided as an educational/inspirational service of the National Garden Bureau and our members. Please credit and link to National Garden Bureau and author member when using all or parts of this article.”
