You will smell a ginger lily before you see one. Walk a Southern garden after seven on an August evening and Hedychium coronarium announces the corner they occupy from twenty feet away, which is the entire point of the plant and the reason the flowers have been worked into garlands wherever the species grows. The epithet says as much: coronarium, used for garlands. These are true relatives of culinary ginger, Zingiberaceae, running on thick aromatic rhizomes and throwing up canes of ribbed, clasping foliage that would earn a place in the border on leaf alone.

The flower repays a close look, because most of what you are admiring is not a petal at all. The broad white wing that gives white ginger lily half the common names in the trade is the labellum, a fused pair of sterile stamens, four to six centimeters across and notched at the tip with a faint yellow wash at the throat. Two more petaloid staminodes flank the labellum, and the true corolla lobes are the narrow strips behind. Each flower lasts about a day, and a single bud will push several hundred of them across roughly six weeks, which is how a clump manages to bloom from late summer into fall without ever looking crowded. The species is the national flower of Cuba.

The genus ranges from the eastern Himalaya and Assam through India, Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam into southern China and Taiwan, and the garden species divide neatly by color: H. coronarium white and night-scented, H. coccineum in scarlet and coral, and selections such as 'Disney' bred for warmer tones. All are herbaceous here. The tops go down with the first hard frost and return from the rhizome in spring, so leave the fallen foliage over the crown as insulation through winter, clear the bed in late winter, and divide in early spring if a clump has outrun the space. Give sun to part shade and ground that stays moist. Ginger lilies will take occasional standing water and will rot in permanent standing water.

One honest caution comes with the generosity. Spread is almost entirely vegetative, by rhizome fragments carried on water and machinery rather than by seed, and while no Southeastern state lists the species as invasive, white ginger lily has caused real trouble in Hawaiian wet forest. The lesson travels even where the listing does not. Site the rhizomes where they are contained, never dump divisions in a ditch or a creek bottom, and a clump stays where you put one. Find more fragrance and structure among our Herbaceous Perennials, warm-climate company in Sub-tropicals, and further scented plants in Our Favorites.