Essay · The Fragrant Garden · The Southeast

Sited by the Nose: A Southern Garden Written in Scent

The eye takes the garden all at once. Fragrance asks you to walk into it. On the plants worth planting for the nose, and where to set them so the scent finds you first.

10 min read  ·  By Fiona von Grey  ·  Aiken, South Carolina

IThe case for scent

A garden built for the eye can be taken in from the kitchen window. You see the whole composition at once, the colors answering one another, and then you go on with the day. A garden built for the nose cannot be seen from anywhere. Fragrance keeps no distance and holds no pose; the scent simply arrives, usually when you are thinking about something else, and pulls you bodily toward the plant that made it. This is the oldest kind of attachment a garden can offer, older than color, and the plants that trade in it deserve a different kind of placement than the ones we grow to look at.

Scent is also weather. The volatile oils that carry a flower's perfume lift on warmth and hang in humid, still air, which is why the same tea olive that seems mute on a cold bright morning will flood an entire courtyard on a muggy evening in October. A fragrant plant set in a wind tunnel or a dry, exposed corner is a fragrant plant wasted. Set the same plant against a warm wall, beside a path you walk at dusk, under a bedroom window left open in the shoulder seasons, and the scent has somewhere to gather and someone to meet. The whole art is placement. You are not decorating a border so much as laying a trap for a passing evening.

A garden built for the eye can be seen from the window. A garden built for the nose has to be walked into.

Our own brand voice keeps a small instruction that says the thing plainly: plant Calycanthus where you will walk past the shrub, not where you will look at the shrub. That is the rule for the whole fragrant garden. Site by the nose, not the eye, and reserve the best-scented plants for the thresholds of daily life, the gate, the front step, the turn in the path, the bench where you actually sit.

IIThe autumn anchor: the tea olive

If a Southern garden keeps only one fragrant plant, the tea olive has the strongest claim. Osmanthus fragrans, the sweet olive of old gardens and guihua of Chinese kitchens, is a slow, dense evergreen in the olive family whose flowers are almost comically small, little cream knots tucked into the leaf axils, easy to miss entirely by looking. The scent is another matter. The flowers throw an apricot-and-ripe-peach perfume that carries clear across a yard, and the timing is the gift: the main flush opens in late summer and autumn, when most of the year's fragrance is spent, and in mild winters the shrub keeps offering scattered flushes into the cold months.

In China the flowers are more than ornament. Sweet osmanthus is gathered to scent tea, to sweeten cakes and jam, and to flavor wine, and the plant carries centuries of poetry and moon-festival association, a thread we followed in Osmanthus and the Moon Palace. In the garden the tea olive asks for full sun to part shade and reasonable drainage, and rewards patience with a large, handsome evergreen that needs almost no intervention once established.

Sweet tea olive

Osmanthus fragrans

The autumn anchor. Tiny cream flowers, enormous apricot fragrance, and an evergreen frame that earns a place even out of bloom. Grow the plant near a door or a path you walk in the evening, and browse the whole clan in our tea olive collection.

• Evergreen shrub
• Full sun to part shade
• Fall into winter bloom
• Apricot scent
• Zones 7 to 10

IIIThe native heart: sweetshrub

For a fragrance that belongs to these woods rather than to the far side of the world, the Carolina allspice is the plant to know. Calycanthus floridus is a deciduous native shrub of the Southeastern uplands, and the maroon, strap-petaled flowers of late spring and early summer smell like nothing else in the garden, a warm, fruity compound that people reach for different words to describe: strawberry, ripe melon, pineapple, banana, bruised apple, a little spice underneath. The old country name, sweetshrub, gets the whole plant across in a single word.

Here is the honest complication, and the reason the plant is worth understanding rather than simply buying. The fragrance of seed-grown sweetshrub is famously inconsistent. The scent varies from one plant to the next, and even on a single shrub the perfume can be generous at dusk and nearly absent by noon; a few plants carry little scent at all. This is why the wise old advice is to buy sweetshrub in bloom, with your nose, and why the best-scented individuals have been selected and named. The clone 'Michael Lindsey' is grown precisely for a reliable, strong fragrance and glossy foliage, and the yellow-flowered 'Athens' carries a dependable scent as well.

To grow a nursery-propagated native like sweetshrub is a small, quiet good beyond the pleasure of the plant, a way of keeping a Southeastern species in gardens and in cultivation. Site the shrub in sun to part shade and ordinary soil, and put the plant where the scent will do its work: beside the porch steps, along the path to the car, under the window you open first on a warm morning.

Carolina allspice, sweetshrub

Calycanthus floridus

The native fragrant heart of the Southern garden, with a fruity late-spring scent that varies plant to plant, so choose a named, reliably scented selection. See the species and the clones on the sweetshrub page.

• Deciduous shrub
• Sun to part shade
• Late spring bloom
• Fruity, variable scent
• Southeastern native

IVThe summer vine: jasmine

Between the spring shrubs and the autumn tea olive, the high summer belongs to jasmine. The true jasmines are the climbing and scrambling species of Jasminum, and the one to plant for perfume is the old poet's jasmine, Jasminum officinale, a hardy twining vine hung with white stars whose evening scent has flavored gardens and perfume for centuries. The large-flowered form, var. grandiflorum, the Spanish or royal jasmine, is the one grown commercially for the perfume trade, and the plant lives up to the pedigree on a warm night against a fence or an arbor.

Jasmine is also where a fragrant garden most often goes wrong, so two cautions earn their place. First, the cheerful yellow winter jasmine, Jasminum nudiflorum, blooms bravely in the cold and is worth growing for that alone, but the flowers are scentless; plant the winter jasmine for the season, not the perfume. Second, the vine most Southerners call Confederate or star jasmine is not a jasmine at all but Trachelospermum, a different genus in a different family; the scent is real and lovely, but the name is a costume. If it is the true jasmines you are after, our field guide to the genus sorts the fragrant from the merely pretty.

VA year, and where to plant it

The pleasure of gardening for scent is that a handful of well-chosen plants can hand the perfume from one to the next around the whole calendar, so the nose is never entirely off duty. Winter belongs to the quiet, powerful shrubs that flower on bare wood: the winter honeysuckle, Lonicera x purpusii, whose small cream flowers carry a lemon sweetness across a cold garden, and the exasperating, wonderful winter daphne, Daphne odora, which pays for a fussy temperament with one of the great fragrances of the year. Spring adds the banana shrub, Magnolia figo, whose flowers scent a whole evening with something close to ripe fruit, and the sweetly reliable Osmanthus x burkwoodii. Summer is the jasmine's, and autumn returns, always, to the tea olive.

A scent calendar for the Southern garden

Whatever you plant, keep the one rule in front of you. Fragrance is for the thresholds, the places the body passes through: the gate, the step, the turn in the path, the seat where you drink coffee, the window you crack on the first warm night of the year. Save the border for the eye, and give the nose the doorways. A garden arranged that way greets you before you have seen a single flower, and for anyone who has come home tired in the dark and been met at the gate by a tea olive, that greeting is the whole reason to grow the plant. For more on the turning season, our love letter to autumn gardening is a fitting companion.

References

• North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, Osmanthus fragrans profile; ScienceDirect overview of Osmanthus fragrans.
• Clemson Home & Garden Information Center, "Sweetshrub"; Chicago Botanic Garden, "A Comparative Evaluation of Sweetshrubs."
• Morton Arboretum and Clemson plant profiles, Calycanthus floridus, Carolina allspice.
• University of Washington Botanic Gardens, plant profile, Osmanthus fragrans f. aurantiacus.