Clethra alnifolia "Sixteen Candles"

Summersweet has long been a shrub gardeners plant by the nose. Native to the moist woods and pond margins of the eastern United States, Clethra alnifolia earned the old country names Sweet Pepperbush and Summersweet for the honey-and-clove perfume that pours off the white summer spikes, a scent that carries clear across a garden on a warm afternoon. Colonists found a further use for the plant: the flowers, crushed in water, raise a soft lather, and were once pressed into service as a field soap.

'Sixteen Candles' is the compact, well-mannered heir to that fragrant lineage. Raised as a seedling of the popular 'Hummingbird' and selected and named by Michael Dirr, whose name needs no introduction to anyone who has ever cracked a woody-plant manual, this summersweet holds sizeable spikes of pure white flowers bolt upright over dark green foliage, like so many candles on a low green cake. The habit stays dense and rounded, three to five feet high, and the leaves turn a clean butter yellow before they fall.

Site 'Sixteen Candles' where the July fragrance can be met in passing, beside a path, a door, or a seating area, and where the bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds working the spikes become part of the show. The shrub tolerates wet ground and even a little salt, so a low, damp corner that defeats other plants suits this one well. Lovely massed along a woodland edge, worked into a mixed border, or grown as a single specimen in a patio pot.