Sweet Smell Of Success

Christopher Lloyd looks at a selection of herbaceous plants with a fragrance

- Christopher Lloyd

To earn our highest praise, a plant must not only look beautiful over a long period of time, but it must also be pleasantly scented. And if the scent is very good, we can even dispense with the beauty – as with mignonette. It is in shrubs that we look mostly for scent – honeysuckles or jasmine that lack it have a strong prejudice in us to overcome – but one should not forget that there are herbaceous plants, too, of whose charm scent forms an integral part.

One of the best and most individual of smells, being the essence of high summer to me, is that possessed by phlox. Another, not quite so summer as this, but with a peppery warmth to it, is the lupin’s scent. The great improvements made to the flowers of these two plants during the past 30 years have in no way lessened their qualities of perfume, as we are wont to complain of modern roses and sweet peas (though without much justification, to my mind).

The old-fashioned double red peonies (paeonia officinalis, of European origin) that flower at Whitsun, have a rather nasty smell, but the later, Juneflowering Chinese peonies have, in addition to a wide range of flower colouring and form, a scent of roses. Bearded irises smell of themselves and a very good scent it is, being strongest, I believe, in the beautiful old variety Iris pallida subsp. dalmatica. Other iris species have quite different scents, such as I. reticulata that smells violets, I. graminea of ripe plums, while I have always contended that Lunguicularis (syn. sttylosa) smells like brown bread and butter.

It is well worth growing the most old-fashioned daylily, Hemerocallis flava [H.lillioasphodelus], for its clean, sweet scent, and its pure-yellow trumpets are also very stately.