highly fragrant perennials?

I live in zone 9a or some say 9b here in Tucson AZ and am interested only in very highly fragrant perennials, esp those that you can smell from a distance as I am starting a fragrance garden. Any suggestions?

Hi Joanie (I assume?),

I've been surprised at the great fragrance from many daylilies. I started growing them only because they were supposed to be (and have proven to be) so easy; but many varieties I've added since that first Stella d'Oro have also been unexpectedly fragrant. The mini-Stella d'Oro smells very nice from a good distance. Others (which I'm just seeing as I peruse Pinetree Garden Seeds' catalog) are Hyperion, Catherine Woodbury, Pardon Me, and Siloam Dream Baby.
There are also a number of hosta varieties that are heavenly, if you have the summer shade for them.
I'm not sure of the zone requirements, but Pycnanthemum (mountain mint) is also a great "smeller."

Good luck,
Michele

This message was edited Jan 10, 2005 12:18 PM

This message was edited Jan 10, 2005 12:19 PM

Hi, I know almost nothing about your zone, but I like fragrant plants too. I have oriental lilies, tall garden phlox, dame's rocket (maybe invasive?), honeysuckle, wisteria, buddleia, joe pye weed, stocks, nicotania, and four o'clocks that smell really good in my garden. Maybe some of these would work for you.

A lot of the perennial pinks/dianthus are very fragrant from a distance- if planted in mass.

And of course- roses.

And let's not forget lavender! I planted a row of Fat Spike (L. grosso) down one side of our driveway and the scent is glorious. I planted a clump of thyme between each lavender, and that filled in the spaces nicely. I'm pretty sure they'd be suitable in zone 9, in fact I think there are some more tender varieties that you could grow that won't overwinter for me here in MD.

Oriental lilies are powerfully fragrant. I have a couple of the "orienpet" hybrids (tall oriental and trumpet lily crosses), and they will knock your socks off from across the yard. I think you can grow those very fragrant Easter-type lilies down south as well. If you want a sweet flowering shrub, check out gardenia. (If that's too large a plant for your space, I saw a dwarf variety in a catalog recently, maybe Wayside, called 'Fragrant Pathways'.)

I'm also a big fan of scented geraniums. I have to take mine inside over the winter (again, they should be hardy for you), but every time I water them or brush against them for some other reason the room smells fabulous. My personal favorites are 'Codys Nutmeg', 'Attar of Roses', 'Lime', 'Chocolate Peppermint', and 'Cinnamon'.

If you want your garden to smell great at night too, I hear Confederate Jasmine is lovely. Evening Stock is another good one, and I think Nicotiana (flowering tobacco) is supposed to be more fragrant at night.

My husband likes to tease that I want all my plants to be at least dual-purpose -- preferably, they should look great and taste great and smell great and be loved by butterflies and hummingbirds and make seeds for songbirds...... LOL

thanks for all your great ideas! Just bought a snail vine to plant. Heard that is very fragrant. Want to buy a pink jasmine too but mine keep dying. Will keep planting!

Critterologist, what kind of thyme did you plant between the lavendars? This sounds so beautiful; I want to try it.

I have a few suggestions to add to these lists:

1) Lilacs! I'm surprised no one else has mentioned them, unless perhaps they mightn't do well in your zone? You can't beat them for fragrance. "Miss Kim" is a small, "traditional" purple lilac that blooms in late May with a great, potent fragrance you can smell from a few feet away, and there are so many more. "Manchurian" is another great fragrant one, with tiny white flowers, if you can find it. But it gets bigger than Miss Kim, so it would depend on what size lilac bush you want, too, as they're not the most exciting bushes when not in bloom.
2) Rosemary would seem a "must", and you can use it for cooking, sachets, etc. as well as enjoying the fragrance in the garden. Lots of fragrant herbs to choose from, but rosemary you can indeed smell as you walk by, whereas many herbs need to be rubbed, crushed or cut.
3) Cytisus (scotch broom). You need to choose your type carefully, as some can get very large and unwieldy (up to 10 ft!) and some types are considered potentially invasive. But I have a small Cytisus ardoinii "Cottage" that makes a nice little upright bush, and is slow-growing to only 2'x3'. In May, it's covered with beautiful,unusual butter-colored flowers that have a very strong and pleasing (if hard to describe!) clean fragrance. The scent is not "floral" in the traditional sense, so you should try to check one out in person to see what you think. I'm attaching a picture of mine shortly after planting in May 2004, so you can see the profuse blooming. After this photo was taken, the green "broom-like" stalks grew up from this plant over the rest of 2004, and I expect a lot more blooms next May.
4) Lantana is another possibility. Technically it's an annual, but you might check to see if it is known to survive the winter where you are; supposedly it fares well year-round in the warmer climates, and it just keeps blooming with multi-colored tiny flowers. The flowers and leaves are actually both fragrant, but as with the scotch broom, you should check one out in person to make sure you enjoy the scent. I love 'em both, and they're something different.
5) In terms of roses, we all have our favorites. I have a small, partly-sunny garden where "Gruss an Aachen" is a repeat bloomer with beautiful flowers that fade from pale apricot to cream, and a strong, elegrant fragrance. The miniature red "Scentsation" is nice, too. You might like an old eglantine bush; I think we had one called "Madame Eglantine" when I was growing up. These tend to grow very tall (eventually 8' or so) and draping over time. On many of the eglantine rose bushes, after a rain, the leaves give off an amazingly strong smell of fresh green apples. It's really refreshing, and I only wish I had room for one in my garden!

Don't forget roses! You get a lots of flowers through repeat blooms from just one plant. Roses are a high return on the investment, I think.

May I add that sense of smell is very individual. The strength and pleasantness of the scent really does change from person to person so it's worth going to a garden or nursery and sticking your nose in some of the many wonderful plants listed above.

I'm saying this because I'm one of a quite large percentage of people who cannot smell Freesia, well I can if I stick my nose right in the trumpet and sniff hard enough to pollinate the back of my skull.

I have order from "Scented Flower Garden" catalogue and have been very pleased with the plants. It might be worth it to go to their website and order a catalogue . They offer scented varieties of alot of perennials I didn't know existed. Here is a link to the" Scoop" on them. Lou http://davesgarden.com/gwd/c/438/

LOL Baa! I didn't realize that certain people can't smell Freesia. I was trying to get people to buy it at a place I worked and I'd say "this smells wonderful" and they'd say "I can't smell anything" and I'd stand there looking stupid, lol... Come to think of it, I think some did polinate the back of their skull...

Well, went to Home Depot the other day and they had South African Jasmine plants. Looked them up on the web and they are very cold hardy to 20 degrees I believe. Of course, didn't say if they would cook in the blazing hot sun here so am planting one behind my fenced garden where it will get a teensy bit of shade and one in a pot on the patio. We will see which lives. Loved your above suggestions.

the best fragrance i have found is a annual that reseeds
NIGHT SCENTED STOCK!!!

As for those shady areas, hostas!
(I personally have Honeybells (spread like crazy) and good old Royal Standard.) Here's a list of the fragrant ones:

Aqua Velva
Emily Dickinson
Flower Power
Fragrant Blue
Fragrant Bouquet
Fried Bananas
Fried Green Tomatoes
Guacamole
Honeybells
Hoosier Harmony
Invincible
Iron Gate Delight
Moonlight Sonata
plantaginea
plantaginea 'Aphrodite'
plantaginea 'Ming Treasure'
Royal Standard
Royal Super
Savannah
So Sweet
Summer Fragrance

Do peonies grow there? I have a Festiva Maxima that I can smell inside the house from down the hill and around a corner when it blooms... also irises, which I never knew had scent.

I strongly seconds oriental lilies. Even if you have to grow them as annuals in your zone (which I don't know if you have to) stargazer are among the most fragrant lilies and they are also the most common and cheapest (oriental) lilies available.

Hey, Joanie! Did you see the Mexican (Spanish) Lavender at The Home Depot on Ina Road? They only had two left on Sunday... somebody must have bought a few.

Who me?

Jen

A friend gave me a night blooming jasmine Vine, I kept it on my screened in porch and it only received morning to early afternoon sun, It grew to about 6' and bloomed profusely. I leave the kitchen door open to my porch and in the evening my whole dining room and kitchen over takes my mind. I really travel to a different place when it blooms. My mind is so overwhelmed I think I am in paradise.

I have to bring it in during the winter as I am zone 5, now I just have to get it to bloom indoors so my mind stays in nice places all year round LOL.

Drew,
I tried looking for Cytisus ardoinii "Cottage" on the internet. Where did you buy it? I only got about 4 references with very little info. Thanks, Linda

Your zone range of 9a and/or 9b falls within the range of 8a - 11 for Hedychium coronarium and within the range of 8a - 10b for tuberose (both double and single). Have you tried growing those yet? They smell heavenly. Throw in some moonflower vines and sweet alysum and nicotania with your scented geraniums, and, together with everyone's suggestions, you have an evening garden of white, scented plants.

And then there's night flowering gourds of the lagenaria persuasion - Lagenaria sicceraria 'Cucuzzi Caravazi'. They have no manners and will trounce anything within 50' (at least), but wuta show for twilight and the moon. If I ever grow them again, I will make sure my neighbor is as goofy over them as I am.

Two more fragrant ones for moonlight are the autumn clematis and crepe myrtle. If you have a small garden, choose a smaller cultivar of white crepe myrtle other than that 'Natchez' (but it blooms from July into September for us).

Bluespiral, you made me drool! I want to make the garden you just described! How gorgeous!

Ivy, thank you. I guess some of those moon events did happen in our garden last year, but they are not concentrated in one spot.

Right now, the wreckage of the night-flowering gourd clinging to the top of our saucer magnolia makes the garden seem as spectral as Halloween. And snow 7" deep certainly heightens that effect. (Neighbors in front of us to the right whose gardens face into the sun on their way down the hill to the river are mostly melted, but not us.)

Even tobacco wouldn't bloom under crepe myrtle 'Natchez', but we did get one "silver" leafed plant to flourish in that shade: Plectranthes coleioides - plus it roots so easily that you can make a nice little ground-hugging carpet of it from one pot quite inexpensively.

There must be something missing in my nose cells, too, Baa. One autumn a lavender creeping lantana had obliged by carpeting its assigned place, but as I was ripping its frosted remains up for the compost pile, an overwhelming odor of dirty socks began to rise around me, and when I looked up, a tribe of vultures was circling overhead. Now, was it just that cultivar and/or species of lantana (if so, what's a good smelling one?) or was it my nose?

Two more "silvery" plants for shade are the Japanese painted fern, Athyrium pictum 'Goeringianum' (this latin has changed, I suspect) and any of those "blue" hostas. They have a different kind of silvery effect in shade than the P. colieoides mentioned above which is sort of a woolly, very pale pea green.

The closest to silver for shade in our garden has been Plectranthus argentatus, also woolly, but with much larger, broader leaves, attaining a size of 3' x 3' and shooting off an airy show of tall thin spikes another foot or so that make a haze of white-icy-blue. When wintering over a plant (like fuchsia) that takes up a large pot, I rub the seedy stalks over the pot and seedlings come up around the fuchsia. For those whose humid, hot summers turn silvery artemisias to mush by August, plectranthus is the answer - both in shade and in sun. There seems to be an endless variety of species within that genus.

Purple-leaved plants make a nice segue away from the "silvers" into other colors:

Viola labradorica does this in a "naturalized" area next to the ferns and hosta - ours has self-sowed enough that it looks like it has always been there.

"Black" ophiopogon (don't waste those seeds - for such an expensive plant, they germinate easily by spring if you stick them in the ground in autumn) and purple-leaved bugle make interesting low maintenance ground covers with the P. coleoides contrasting with it. If I ever acquire a white colchicum, I would love to grow it among the black ophiopogon. It would be single.

Just because you can only put one pair of feet in one spot of ground doesn't mean you have to limit yourself to one plant in one spot of ground. For any spot of ground, think shrub+undercarpeting+bulb+strategic pocket for summer annual - the variations are endless and the formula keeps "low maintenance" interesting. Remember the vines - there's always a size/habit not too throttling to the host.

Well, I was just going to check the weather - hope you didn't mind my digressing.

PS - You must read Vita Sackville-West's Garden Book. On pages 16 - 17, there's an essay written when the idea of a white flower garden was still germinating in her mind. An owl seems to have been a catalyzing image for her. She wrote, "...I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn-owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight - the pale garden that I am now planting, under the first flakes of snow."

So, to the formula above, try to add a tree somewhere in the vicinity of your moon garden to invite the owl. If my memory is working here, Vita planted a silvery, willow-leaved pear. Does anyone know if that's correct?

Yes, she did! I've been trying to grow one in my garden ever since I read her books and saw them planted in every garden in England! So far, I've killed two. Now, I can't even find it for sale. May replace with Toyo-nishiki willow or Autumn olive, which is actually a weed here. Another beautiful silvery plant is cardoon. I had one for exactly one day last year. it was about three feet tall. I brought it home from the nursery, put it out in the garden so I could see it from my window. The next morning I got up, NO cardoon. Something ate the entire plant. I found the root so I left it in the ground thinking it might grow back and the next day the root was gone.

If anyone has Plumeria stock to sell, please let me know. I am a 1ar rimw grower and need to stick with easy growers. I live in Tucson, AZ. Please advise, whatley@ww4.us

Sorry for the late reply, Linda/RDT! I bought my Cytisus ardonii "Cottage" last May at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden plant sale. I just checked the tag, and it was grown by a nursery called "Environmentals". I found their website: http://environmentalsnursery.com/index.htm It looks like they're a wholesaler to nurseries and landscapers, but they do provide a list of local and online vendors who carry their plants, and "Cottage" is still listed on their site. I can only tell you that my little plant seems to have somehow doubled in size over the winter, now with a full complement of the thin "broomlike" branches, and looks great. I can't wait for the blooms in May. Given how great they were the first year, they should be twice as impressive this Spring. "Environmentals" looks like an interesting site, so thanks for getting me to dig into this more. Now I'll probably buy more odd plants... ;-)

Drew

This message was edited Mar 18, 2005 6:03 PM

This message was edited Apr 6, 2005 10:04 PM

Being in AZ, water must be a concern.
Lavender will give you season long fragrance. You're lucky in the wider variety you can grow. Some days I even smell mine in winter if the sun has been out.

Russian sage is another drought tolerant plant that will fragrance the yard in the heat.

Echinacea - The cone flowers have a long bloom period and there's more than just the purple magnus now days. I surprise visitors where the purfume is coming from on warm afternoons when a good flush is open. The white swan has a great fragrance but isn't as tall and has been a bit temperamental for me. Last years introduction of the 'Orange Meadowbrite' gives you another color and it's purported to have a new fragrance but my very small starters didn't do much. The Paradoxa Yellow has a different flower form and nice yellow but is still a cone flower. There are many more but one you should definitely investigate is the Razzmatazz!!

A repeat blooming, fantastically fragranced rose is the 'Autumn Damask'. We're talking wow factor on the sniff meter and she's tough.