Calycanthus floridus 'Athens'

Yellow-chartreuse, mid to late spring

Flowers:
This is where 'Athens' breaks from the family. Where the wild sweetshrub blooms a dark maroon, 'Athens' opens a soft yellow-green, pale chartreuse petals unfurling like a small lotus, an inch and a half or so across, built from the strap-like tepals (fused sepals and petals, no true petals at all) that give every Calycanthus its strange, layered look. They appear in mid to late spring and carry on sporadically into summer. The scent is the headline: where seed-grown sweetshrub is a gamble, 'Athens' is a known clone bred for the nose, reliably and powerfully fragrant, often called the most fragrant of all the Calycanthus, with a riper, more tropical character than the maroon forms, melon and cantaloupe and pineapple rather than plain strawberry. One small honesty: the pale tepals can show a faint brown spotting as they age, a minor blemish that the fragrance more than forgives.

Fruit:
As with all sweetshrubs, the flowers give way to a leathery, urn-shaped capsule, ripening from green to brown and persisting on the stems into winter as a quiet structural oddity. Fruit set on the named clones tends to be sparse, this is a plant grown for flower and scent rather than for what follows, so treat any capsules as a small autumn bonus rather than a feature. They're worth a closer look when they come: the same wrinkled, fig-like pods that have made the genus a curiosity for centuries.

Foliage:
The leaves are a clean, glossy mid-green, simple and opposite with a pointed tip, slightly smaller than those of the wild plant and carried densely enough to give 'Athens' a tidy, well-furnished body through the season. Like the species, the foliage is aromatic when bruised, a second spice to find on the walk past. In autumn the whole shrub turns a clear, soft yellow, an unhurried fall color that suits the spring flowers. Dirr rated this group among the most sun and heat tolerant of all the sweetshrubs he trialed, so the foliage holds up where lesser forms would scorch.