Bring back memories, with
sweet-smelling common lilacs.

Finding the Right Fragrance

Fragrance is magical. It evokes memory better than any other sense. Brush a tomato plant, and suddenly you're 7 years old again, planting a vegetable garden with your dad. Catch a spicy whiff of sycamore, and you're a college freshman, reliving kisses under the trees on the commons.

Even unpleasant scents have their purposes. Bad-smelling plants are often the inedible or poisonous ones. Bad odors also protect the plants, persuading people, birds, and insects to stay away.

It's easy to add a pleasurable dimension to your landscape by filling it with appealingly fragrant plants. But not every plant touted as aromatic is indeed so.

The scent of roses, for example, is notoriously fickle. Some, such as 'Mister Lincoln,' have a legendary rich fragrance. Others are only lightly scented. Still others deliver about as much bouquet as a sheet of notebook paper. Conversely, peonies aren't famous for their fragrance, but a small stand has enough scent to fill a corner of your garden.

Careful, though: The wrong choice can be disgusting. The Koreanspice viburnum (Viburnum carlesii) smells spectacular. But other viburnums can make you scent sorry. Carolina allspice (Calycanthus), when correctly grown from cuttings, is a shrub with a nice spicy aroma. But inferior plants grown from seed can smell like vinegar.

With fragrant flowers, as with people, appearances can be deceiving. Hybridizing often sacrifices fragrance for gorgeous looks. Many of the most scent-laden species are the most humble-looking, with small white or cream flowers and a growth habit that tends toward scraggly -- such as sweet Annie (Artemisia annua), sweet olive (Osmanthus fragrans), and mignonette (Reseda odorata).

But a few look as spectacular as they smell. The wildly popular 'Star Gazer' Oriental lily will draw people across a garden to examine its beauty more closely. Then they're hit with its heady fragrance for a true gardening double whammy.

That's what magic is all about, mesmerizing the nose as well as the eye.