Osmanthus x burkwoodii (x Osmarea burkwoodii)

Osmanthus burkwoodii is one of the most reliable and sweetly scented of the spring evergreens, a dense, compact shrub that disappears under clusters of tiny white flowers in April and perfumes the whole garden around it. The small, dark green, leathery leaves are finely toothed and glossy, holding their color and structure through the year, so that the plant earns a place long after the fragrance has faded.

The shrub has a tangled and rather charming pedigree. Raised in England in the 1920s by the nursery firm of Burkwood and Skipwith, the plant began as a cross between two different genera, Osmanthus delavayi from Yunnan and the western-Asian Phillyrea decora, and was first christened with a hybrid genus name of its own, Osmarea burkwoodii. Botanists have since folded Phillyrea into Osmanthus, which quietly demoted the cross to a within-genus hybrid, Osmanthus burkwoodii, though the old Osmarea name still turns up on labels. The genus name is Greek for fragrant flower, and the epithet honors Albert Burkwood, whose name rides on several fine garden hybrids.

In the garden this is an easygoing, slow-growing evergreen, hardy through USDA zones 6 to 8 and happy in full sun to part shade, even in the difficult dry shade under high trees. Give the plant well-drained soil with a little irrigation while establishing, since Osmanthus resents both drought stress when young and standing wet, and the shrub settles into a dense rounded form of five to eight feet, tolerating shearing well for a hedge. The Royal Horticultural Society has given the plant its Award of Garden Merit, a fair mark of dependability.

Use Osmanthus burkwoodii as a fragrant spring-flowering hedge or screen, a specimen by a path or door where the scent will be met, or a quiet evergreen backbone in a shrub border, and lean on the dense habit and deer resistance for a low-maintenance planting. Few evergreens give so much fragrance for so little trouble, and fewer still carry as good a story.