Anyone have opinions on this...esp. regarding it's scent?
Thanks,
Chantell
Blue Mist Shrub
I had 2 that promptly died--at least they flowered first. The scent must not have been worthy or I would have cried more, lol.
violabird,
Thanks for your experience. I only ask b/c I've got limited room and been babying this little blue mist shrub over the winter. The little flowers that were on it had no scent...yet it was sold supposedly for it's "frangrance." Hmmm....I think not. LOL
Is the blue mist shrub you're talking about a Caryopteris (sorry...I garden mostly by latin names because there are too many common names that refer to multiple very different plants) If so, I have several of these and never noticed that they had any fragrance at all.
Yes, I too would like to know what plant we are talking about - common names for plants can be very different over here; I've never heard of "blue mist shrub".... I now know that "batchelor's buttons" are what I call cornflowers, "moonflowers" seem to be both white morning glories and datura, "black-eyed susans" are NOT thunbergia,(as they are over here), but I've forgotten what they are. Rudbeckia? Or is that brown-eyed Susans?? Help! So yes, Linneaus was on to something with the Latin names, although it gives us more to learn....
Maggi xxxx
Caryopteris x clandonensis - BLUE MIST SHRUB, BLUE SPIREA
Deciduous flowering herbaceous shrub. Attractive fragrant powder-blue blooms are produced in late summer. Long blooming season. Moderate growth rate. Grows 2-3' tall and 2' wide. Uses: border, foundation, mass planting.
All ads I find for it mention fragrant...yet I'm telling you the little blooms on it when I first got it...no scent!
Thanks Chantell. That helped a lot. I have some seeds for this from Philomel, (DG ubergardener), and I'm meeting up with her tomorrow!(What a coincidence). I'll ask her about the fragrance. I picked it out of the European RR because it said it was fragrant when I looked it up on internet, so it had better be.....
Maggi xxxx
Y'all are saying some unkind things about one of my favorite plants - hope you don't mind my 2 cents here -
There are some plants for the fragrant garden that bide their time until a sunny day in deep summer when the sun hits their leaves and releases aromatics hidden from the nose until then. Caryopteris is one of them; any of the herbs with fragrant leaves do the same thing; Geranium macrorrhizum and its cultivars, also. The resin from a pine grove is another for any time.
Leave these out, and lose the harmonics weaving around the melody.
Caryopteris has other bonuses - it's silvery leaves look good all summer and snort at heat and humidity, and are more dependably winter-hardy here than artemisia 'Powis Castle' was for us. In fact, to get that haze of silver "on point" at the beginning of a walk beneath the dark crimson rose 'Othello', we replaced the ill-behaved 'Powis Castle' with caryopteris.
Bees are said to love blue most, so it's a great bee plant. Caryopteris self-sows and roots easily. To thicken the "haze", cut back in late winter, which is March for us.
Sure beats Skunk Cabbage -:)
Don't get me wrong--I do love my Caryopteris, they are very beautiful, just never knew they were supposed to be fragrant!
ecrane, I hope you'll forgive me - when it comes to plants, I enjoying playing with the King's English and get carried away.
One of my favorite horticultural battles was when the Washington Post columnist, Henry Mitchell, singled out Black-Eyed Susans as one of the ugliest flowers known to him. The letters that flew back and forth in the letters-to-the-editor section of the magazine "Horticulture" were ernest and passionate - a national nurserymen's association blasted Mitchell for besmirching what they felt to be one of the most useful plants in the trade.
Well - imagine caring enough about flowers to get that hot under the collar! For once, it looked to me like folks had their priorities straight. But it was great fun and hilarious to me; so, although I don't intend to ruffle anyone's feathers, it's hard to resist paying homage to Mitchell - just a teensy, little bit.
So when I alluded to "unkind remarks" about caryopteris, I was kidding.
So bluespiral - I guess I'll ask you....are you saying yes it does have a scent or no? Couldn't quite figure that out by your comments...my brain's been MIA today...LOL. I only started this post b/c I have a small townhouse size yard and wanted to make the most of it...both color and scent. I love my lavenders....rosemary...been babying confederate jasmine all winter along w/the Blue Mist to be put into the ground as soon as it warms. You obviously like it...so tell me...scent? Certainly the fact that it sounds like it will thrive in our weather here is a plus. :)
Chantell, yes, caryopteris is fragrant, but it's the leaves not the flowers. The leaves sit there and do nothing except look beautiful and silvery - until! the sun hits them and releases aromatic fragrances in the leaves. It's not a powerful fragrance - kind of a subtle, pungent, herbal mintiness. It won't knock your socks off. But the garden will be more boring without it.
Do all of your really fragrant plants have great-looking foliage all summer up until frost? If they do, ya gotta share your list of what you're growing with me (serious) so I can compost the caryoptis and make room for them (not serious).
PS - another great silvery plant of no use to the schnozz wutsoever is: Plectranthus argentatus. Like caryopteris, it stays beautiful until frost no matter what the weather or humidity. But, it's effect is more solid and the leaves are larger, almost succulent, almost velvet, and it is more shade tolerant. Usually must be wintered over inside.
Off the top of my head the fragrant ones that have retained their color (of course their color being "just" green LOL) throughout the season (including winter thus far) would be my Lavender and Rosemary. Everything else frangrance-wise dies & comes back seasonally. I've read so many places about the Rosemary not doing well to zone 7 but honestly I've had just fine luck with it. It's just the old stand-by that they sell in those 2-3 in pots at Walmart each year...nothing fancy. Didn't realize how much I'd grown accustom to the under-lying Rosemary scent until I foolishly dug mine up a few years back and gave them to a friend. Boy did I regret that!! So I've got one now - in my rock garden of all spots. As for the zone 7 issue - they say the same about the French Lavender - that it's not as hardy as some of the others - doing great for me...in this nasty clay soil to boot. I couldn't be anywhere that I didn't have at least a few lavenders placed through-out the yard. It is without question my favorite scent!! What do you have that does well for you?
Chantell, fragrance from the standpoint of February into April here in our Maryland garden is a huge topic - better get a cup of coffee before reading this.
Regarding lavender and rosemary types of plants, let me begin with a description of part of our garden -
Our tiny mill-worker's house was built into a hill, which is held away from the back of the house with a low stone wall. Half of the wall goes back a ways for an 8 x 13 flagstoned patio, and the other half is just the width of a narrow walkway from the back of the house.
That second half (8 x 17) includes 2 tiny ponds for waterlilies (one over the erstwhile well). The logical, fragrant, low plant to emphasize in this small area, for us, was thyme. Thanks to trading with the very generous Critterologist last summer, there's quite a variety of thyme there now (will dmail her to join this thread) which include some of the following:
Thymus 'Yellow Transparent' -
She gave me one clump which I pulled apart to line the edge of that wall where it turns to go down hill. It immediately thickened into gold-tinged, cascading mounds and has a wonderful fragrance. It has given a strong evergreen presence to the garden all winter long.
Thymus lanuginosa (woolly thyme)
This one came from Stillridge Herb Farm in Ellicott City (you haven't lived until you've treated your nose to their barn where all the scents of herbs drying from the beams and mingling with various potpourri and herbal crafts come together). This thyme has silvery, woolly foliage that hugs the ground like a flat rug. Actually, I don't recommend growing it on our flat, clay-ish ground - instead, it is filling a tiny slope of river stone in this garden and has also remained "ever-silver" through this winter. It creeps out from under the silvery, low (not fragrant) evolvulus (leaves quite dead over winter).
The other thymes have been less vigorous than the foregoing, but since were only rooted last summer, have hopes for them this summer and include:
Hall's woolly thyme (from Critterologist)
That tiny 8 x 17 garden is stepped up the hill in several levels. This one grows out from beneath gray santolina over a low stone wall, beyond which I hope to grow white heliotrope ($2 or $3 a 3" or 4" pot from Hubers in Perry Hall last spring) next summer. It's very low, but not as flat as T. lanuginosa with more gray than silver leaves.
Thymus vulgaris (cuttings rooted from local Korean grocery store)
No label came with this one - I call it T. vulgaris only because it resembles descriptions of it. It has a very powerful thyme aroma which is wonderful for cooking. It's gray-green, about 6" tall and edges the pond beneath the foregoing Hall's woolly thyme. It's leaves persist well into winter, but by now they're gone. A plant of rosemary (evergreen so far) is in one corner behind it over the patio floor, and hopefully lavender veris will have another corner behind it just out the back door. Iris reticulata is about to bloom beneath the rosemary.
Thymus 'Hot and Spicey"
Hopefully Critter will correct me on this name - I hope to see it fill out the corner with the lavender. Right now, it's only 2 tiny sprigs of promise with an intriguing name.
Caraway thyme
A pitiful, single branch is persisting on the wall over the patio above the rosemary. This one is especially loved for its strong fragrance and said to be very hardy and to be a more open, less dense carpet. It's off to a slow start, but hope it'll take off this summer.
Regarding growing Mediterranean-type herbs around here that are used to a more arid climate and soils more stony and less clay-ey than ours, growing these plants either over a wall (improves drainage) and/or with low stones around their crowns (the part of a plant where the root system meets the top leafy part) can make all the difference in how well they grow for us Mid-Atlantic gardeners.
For the last couple of weeks, we've been enjoying the far-reaching, honey-like perfume of Sarcoccoca hookeriana, which is a low (12 - 18") evergreen that keeps our hill from eroding along the side of the house, below the Thymus 'Yellow Transparent'. Once established, it's tolerant of quite a bit of shade and drought.
Am hoping to germinate seed of Prunus mume (from The Fragrant Path) to grow behind the sarcoccoca - another strong, pervasive wint-pring fragrance to enjoy during any warm spell of our late winter (give sun and shelter from winter wind).
Below the sarcocca, near the porch steps, is a dwarf rhododendron with ethereal, pale cream/pink/yellow flowers that wonderfully contrasted in the past with dark blue grape hyacinths that supplied the fragrance lacked by this rhodo. These haven't been long-lived for us - does anyone else have a different experience? It gets very shady toward the front.
Crepe myrtles have a range of fragrance - let me warn everyone with a small garden to not plant the cultivar 'Natchez' - it will become a monster forest tree in a small garden. We planted a pair beside the gate that leads out from the patio garden to a rising slope on which we built retaining walls for a "kitchen" garden now too shaded for sun-loving vegies. The multiple trunks of Natchez rise like fluted columns with smooth, muscle-y peeling bark (a major architectural feature in winter) and flower from July into September with fragrant, white panicles that light up the hill at twilight. Soooo, we eat a lot more Chinese red mustard than tomatoes - too beautiful to take out. The evergreen Christmas fern makes a beautiful winter underplanting. Somehow, the oriental lilies 'Silver Realm' and 'Casablanca' come up through the ferns under this tree and perfume the whole patio in August.
Have you ever picked a bouquet of snowdrops for the house? A whiff close to your nose is another heavenly honey-ish fragrance to enjoy now. Wonderful to naturalize among roots and periwinkle beneath a truly monster silver maple. For the small garden where you can fit in a 6' to 10' woody shrub that you would prune for the effect of a tree in a small space, the late winter tiny bulbs like snowdrops, winter aconite (haven't noticed fragrance), Siberian squill, crocus (some very fragrant) and those early tiny daffodils like Tete a tete or a cyclamen type of daffie are perfect to naturalize beneath. Viburnum carlessi is one of the most powerful, clove scented plants I have ever encountered for April, here. We hope that V. Bodnantse 'Dawn' will give similarly fragrant flowers in future late winters. V. 'Mohawk' is also said to have this fragrance, as well as to make a better 4-season shrub. Epimediums (am not aware of any fragrance) make beautiful "living mulches" in these situations under woody plants, and the National Arboretum outside Washington, DC undercarpets an alley of deciduous shrubs with a rosy, low epimedium that blooms in April with the blue Siberian squill (self-sows in our garden, but don't remember if fragrant). The hazels would also work here (Hamamelis mollis 'Pallida' has bloomed from late January into March for us in past winters - another great winter fragrance, and then there are the more subtly perfumed catkins of the twisted hazel (Corylus avellana - Corkscrew hazel).
(Also on the edges of the "kitchen" garden are the tiny, April flowering Puschkinia scilloides - our erstwhile neighbor was delighted when they colonized his "lawn" - its fragrance has been compared to mignonette)
A small evergreen for wint-pring which is too tender for us but might do well for you is Daphne odora, said to possibly be the most powerfully fragrant plant in the world, and certainly transplanted my nose all too briefly to heaven while it was growing at the National Arboretum at the corner of the visitor center house - evidently short-lived, but worth the effort. If you grow it, give it your best micro-climate of sun and shelter. (Hardier farther north for February - March is Daphne mezereum, deciduous, about 3' tall, powerfully fragrant, poisonous berries)
Also for fall into spring is Viola odorata. Am hoping to germinate seed to grow near a hedge of Syringa meyeri 'Palibin' that grows on the sunward side of a long trellis extending from the crepe myrtle at the back of the patio garden. Have traded for pink Viola odorata from Sorgina, which also hope to grow there. It will welcome the summer shade there, but also get the winter sun it needs.
Back to the patio garden - it's bisected by a brick path to the gate in the crepe myrtle. The narrow, tall 'Dragonlady' holly is on the property boundary (April fragrance) among other woody plants. Against the brick path (otherwise to be lined with the aromatic leaves of Geranium macrorrhizum 'Will Ingwersen') is a tiny flagstoned area with two little beds on that path planted with hyacinths - another heavenly fragrance that pervades this entire garden in April (Wilson and Bell in The Fragrant Year say some hyacinths do not amuse the nose - have not met any of those, but the white ones we grow are wonderful to us). I hope to over-sow it with evening stock this summer (Matthiola longiflora syn. M. bicornis) - you should read Notmartha's description of the fragrance of this one.
For us, all of this has been a matter of designing plant combinations based on groundcover/shrub themes. We would not have been able to do this working full time, etc., without the "living mulch" attributes of groundcover. Yes, there's a lot of the invasive periwinkle, especially under the pines in the front, but it has given us time to do other things.
Shortly after we married in the 70s, we were traveling through the Eastern shore and stopped at a corner bookstore in a small town there. In that store, with no idea of what I was buying or what it would lead to, I found a copy of Wilson and Bell's The Fragrant Year which has been my guru of fragrance all these years. Can't recommend it highly enough for the Mid-Atlantic section of our country, and hopefully, if there's enough demand, the Godine Press can be persuaded to reprint it, as they have other important out-of-print gardening books.
Wow...that was a pleasant visual journey...thank you! I wish I had the space you have....grrr, mine's just a townhouse yard....but I love to fill it w/scents. You gave me much to think about with the different thymes...I can always place some between the low growing sedum and below the mints that I have to keep close watch on...mercy they'll take over the place if I don't keep them "in check." So many ideas you've spawned...thank you!
Also...any idea where I can find a Daphne odora - I looked it up and I think I'd be interested in 1 or 2 of those. I have a definate weakness for anything with a spicy scent...
Chantrell, thank you for "listening", and glad you found something in there you liked. The PlantFiles on DG often list vendors. Here's the DG page for Daphne odora - I keyed "Daphne" into genus and "odora" into species: http://davesgarden.com/pf/adv_search.php?searcher%5Bcommon%5D=&searcher%5Bfamily%5D=&searcher%5Bgenus%5D=Daphne&searcher%5Bspecies%5D=odora&searcher%5Bcultivar%5D=&searcher%5Bhybridizer%5D=&search_prefs%5Bsort_by%5D=rating&images_prefs=both&Search=Search
I have read that the variegated cultivar is hardier than the plain leaf, and it was blooming in a section of the Asian / Japanese bonsai area at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC yesterday. I think Wilson and Bell may be right - there may not be a more wonderful, powerful fragrance than that of this plant.
This message was edited Mar 6, 2006 1:41 PM
Chantell, I met up with Philomel yesterday,( in a French nursery - where else -lol), and she agrees with Blue spiral - it is the leaves of the blue spirea that are aromatic, rather than the flowers being fragrant...She says it's a lovely bush though, and easy to grow.
Karen, what a lovely description of your garden - I could imagine the smells, as well as the sights. The pink violet is flowering away outside here in little pots, waiting to be sent to you - do you think the weather is ok now to send it?
Maggi xxxx
Well everyone will be happy to know when I came into work (where I'm keeping the little Blue Mist till warmer weather) I did a leaf "rub" test. Ah...there's th scent...now I'm a happy camper!! Thanks to all of you!!
Going to be ordering 2 of the Daphne odora - would the scent be as good w/the variegated one?
Sorgina, would April be okay to send the plant? I could baby it in a pot in and out of the house until May (5/5/06 is last spring frost reported in my neighborhood). Right now, temps are yo-yoing like mad over here right now, with the garden arctic tundra one minute and tropical ooze the next.
Chantell, Wilson and Bell talk about the fragrance of both plain and variegated Daphne odora as being like "...the old-fashioned dessert, ambrosia, orangey with a strong undercurrent of coconut" without distinguishing between the two.
They also say it makes a great houseplant, but that dry, indoor house temps at night will set it back - it prefers cool temps and when happy can bloom from November to February in a mild clime. In Washington, DC, whether indoors our outdoors at the arboretum, I have seen it bloom most prolifically in March.
Wilson and Bell also say, "a loose soil lightened with sand and limestone is best since this daphne does not seem to thrive in acidity." If you're in the tidewater part of Virginia where my parents gardened, then you may already have somewhat sandy soil, but with a high water table, so making a raised bed when amending or replacing soil for this plant might be a good idea. It's possible to have appropriate temps for wintering a plant, but if the drainage isn't good, then the plant may not make it through winter anyway.
Here where I live in Maryland, much of our bedrock is granite, which is a major determinant of the clay nature of our soil. So, a raised bed is also a good idea, here, too for many plants. On our hill, every bed has an elevated lower edge or slope.
Soil here is not sandy...but that yucko clay. Where I was thinking about putting it is already a raised bed so I think it should do ok. Just need to make up my mind which type I want...LOL Decisions, decisions...
Chantell, that French nursery I visited had several of the variegated Daphne odorata in bloom and they smelled dIvine!
maggi xxxx
sorgina,
Thank you...still haven't made up my mind...better soon so I can put that order in. :) Thanks for your thoughts on scent!!
Chantell
For all that were kind to share/mention the Daphne Odora for scent....whaaa whooo to you!!! Found someone who graciously shared variegated cuttings with me and I'm attempting to root them as I type. I opened that box and BAM!!! What a wonderful smell...soft baby powder kind af scent. OMG...I so hope these root successfully!!