Which Plants Are Best For Scent?

Sweet smelling plants always add extra enjoyment to any kind of garden.
Even if you only have space for one tiny pot on a balcony or window-box, make it a scented plant.

The fragrance will travel on the breeze through warm air; so plant them where you can enjoy the natural perfume while sipping your morning cuppa or relaxing with an evening drink.

 

Here at Australian Plants Online we have many scented plants for you, suitable for all kinds of garden.

Which plants are best for scent? That depends on your preference!
However, as you sniff, you'll soon discover that white-coloured varieties often smell more strongly than their coloured siblings.

 

Imitation - Or The Real Thing?

Did you know? Intensely-fragranced white flowers often have chemical substances called indole and skatole in their perfume mix.
In trace amounts, it's the sexy scent of many white flowers : orange blossom, jasmine, gardenia, tuberose, stephanotis, oriental lily.

Hugely popular and replicated chemically in many of the world's most expensive perfumes, indole and skatole are highly complex with many useful applications outside of perfume, which are only now being discovered.

And for the price of the cheapest bottle of perfume trying to imitate a flower, you can get twenty or more flowering tubestock plants to fill your garden with true genuine fragrance year after year.

 

Here are some of our favourite white-flowered plants to add fragrance to your life.

 

Glamorous Gardenia

One of our favourite scented flowers is the gardenia, which has a powerful, sweet scent very popular with the perfume industry.

Gardenias have deep green glossy leaves and creamy-white flowers, usually double ( that is, with multiple rows of petals). This makes them sought after as indoor plants and gift plants; the most well-known variety is probably Florida which you will often see gift-wrapped in fancy florist shops.

Some gardenias such as Radicans, O So Fine™ and the powerfully-scented Grandiflora Star are low-growing, spreading in habit, and make excellent ground-cover plants. Others can be left to grow into tall hedges.

All gardenia flowers are beautiful, all but the native form are highly fragranced, and we usually have a good range of choice in stock - along with Randia, the native gardenia, which is distantly related.

 

Popular for a Reason

The most popular scented shrub with our gardeners is Murraya, and we offer four kinds, all fragrant.

The best-selling mock orange (Murraya paniculata) has clusters of small white waxy sweet-scented flowers, with a powerful perfume; they contrast with glossy dark leaves, to make a sweet-smelling dense tall privacy hedge.

Min a Min, a specially-bred compact low-growing form, has small dainty bright-green leaves, rounded at the tip, and sweet-smelling white flowers, less intensely perfumed than its relative.

Hip High is slightly larger all round than Min a Min, with all the same good qualities; and Sweet Privacy halfway between Min a Min and paniculata.

All make excellent hedges in frost-free gardens, where they will scent the breeze on a warm afternoon.

 

Mock Orange, Real Orange

Murraya mock orange may be a best-seller, but it is not the only fragrance game in town.

There's also Philadelphus mock orange,
Choisya mock orange,
and of course, the real thing, true orange blossom.

As you would imagine, all smell divine, powerful and sweet, and fill the air with the authentic perfume that fragrance companies try so hard, and so expensively, to imitate.

This abundance of mock and real orange blossoms is one of the reasons we use botanic names at Australian Plants Online, so you know exactly which plants you are buying, and can plant and care for them accordingly.

 

Vines and Climbers

If you have little space in your garden, or want to maximise your fragrance-growing opportunities, then why not grow up instead of out?

Vines and climbers will give you living colour and natural fragrance without taking up too much soil space. You can even grow them in a pot, so you can place them by an open window to enjoy the fragrance in the evenings.

 

Chinese star jasmine (Trachelospermum) is the smell of spring and summer here in QLD, surprisingly cold-hardy, and a very popular and versatile plant.

Truejasmine (Jasminum polyanthum) shown, and Arabian Jasmine and sambac (Jasminum nitidum) all have highly-fragrant white flowers, and can be trained against trellises and over fences, grown through trees and shrubs, or clipped into a loose hedge.

 

Fragrant Shrubs

For larger gardens with enough space for a large privacy hedge, why not plant the beautiful and softly-scented Magnolia Little Gem?
Its large dark leaves with tan undersides are very handsome, and a striking backdrop to the huge all-year-round flowers, which the bees love as much as we do.

For more fragrant impact, its relative princess magnolia or port wine magnolia (Michelia) is a great choice, with glossy dark leaves and pretty cream-white flowers, smaller than Little Gem but packing an alluring scent of bubble-gum, banana, and port!
We have seven varieties of white-flowered Michelia through the year, along with their fragrant cousin, Michelia champaca.

 

Seasonal Scents

It's easy to forget about them, as they disappear for half the year under the earth, but for powerful floral fragrance you can't go past bulb flowers!

Spring brings the scent in a big way, with hyacinth, freesia (shown), lily of the valley, narcissus and jonquil - all one of the great pleasures of early spring gardening.

Plant the bulbs in autumn, forget about them, and in spring they'll pop up to delight your nostrils.

 

In summer, the emphasis turns to big showy bold colour, but there's still fragrance to be had from bulbs, when you plant lilies. And how! Oriental lilies, LA lilies, regal lilies (Lilium regale), and longis or Christmas lilies (Lilium longiflorum) are all strongly perfumed, very intense, and you won't need many to make an impact in a sheltered garden.

You'll find our bulbs in the main menu when it's the right season to plant them.

 

Don't forget annual flowers!

When thinking about the best garden plants for scent, there's a huge range of white flowering annuals to sow and grow too. From phlox and stocks to sweet alyssum and the incomparable sweet peas.

You can filter our Flower Seed category, like all our plant categories, by scented and by flower colour to find the perfect plants to sweeten your life.

 

What's your favourite garden scent? Or are you waiting to discover it?