Fragrant shade perennials

[Steve and/or Erin]

Am I asking too much?

I'd love to plant anything fragrant that can tolerate full to partial shade under my newborn's bedroom window.

Thanks in advance for any help- Erin

[presley]

both nicotiana and mirabilis jalapa "four o-clocks" are shade tolerant flowers. However, in many climates both are annual plants. However, they require little care after planting. (Depending on climate, you can also plant them by seed, saving some money)

[Ann]

"Steve and/or Erin" expounded:

There are fragrant hostas, Honeybells comes to mind.

[Cheryl Isaak]

Hosta "Honeybells" is fragrant, there may be others.

Cheryl

[Frankie V. Fernandez, MD]

Try

Comes very highly recommended.

Frankie

[lgb]

Are we talking about the blooms only, or is the whole plant fragrant? I love hostas, but have to admit the bloom period isn't very long.

[Leon Trollski]

Sweet William is a very fragrant shade groundcover. Some think it invasive, but it is easy to yank out. In the middle ages the blooms were used to scent sheets and pillows.

[Merle O'Broham]

I'm having great luck with hardy geranium in Chicago. They're low (5-8" by my eyeball) they creep and fill the air with a sweet perfumy smell. Things are just poking through the ground as of a few weeks ago here and as I was raking out my beds I got a snoutful of pretty strong fragrance from them. .02

[paghat]

I see that flowerscentedgardens.com includes as "scented" items that may very briefly have a very slight scent apt to be missed by everyone, or may have a slight scent if you stick your nose in the flowers & concentrate so hard that the scent might at least be conjured up by wishful thinking, or may have no scent at all unless the leaves or blooms are crushed. So one is still stuck doing a bit of research for a list of flowers that actually scent the GARDEN in the manner of jasmine, oriental hyacinth, heliotrope, carnations, specific varieties of deciduous azaleas, or roses.

Partial to full shade definitely increases the difficulty of finding anything GENUINELY scented for a sincerely . flowerscentgardens offers such as Corydalis flexuosa which can barely be kept alive except in the Pacific Northwest where its easy, & requires you to get down on your knees real close to detect the faint scent. Nicotinia aka Evening Stocks would be more credible, but even that would want only a little shade, not nearly full shade. There are some very sweetly scented lilies that can do okay in a bit of shade, but not honestly well-flowering in deep shade.

Hosta plantagninea has a boring spike of flowers that if you planted enough of them in deep shade would scent up the joint for a short time; I don't think any other genus of hosta is seriously scented; there are several cultivars of H. plantagninea but if growers were honest they're all pretty much the same, certainly the same in terms of the boring stalk of blooms.

For our zone (8, Puget Sound) one of the most fragrant plants for shade (even dryish shade) is sarcococca. It blooms winter, has a vanilla scent. There are tall bushing species, & short spreading species, they all have pretty much the same broadleaf evergreen leaves & small dangling winter flowers. A single small plant can't make much of an impression, but several small ones or a couple big ones can strongly scent up the shade area for a few winter weeks leading into spring. They are slow growers so invest in the largest available in order t ohave the maximum number of blooms, since it takes a lot of those little flowers to add up to a noticeable amount of perfume.

If a vine can CLIMB into sunlight then there are a few sun-loving choices that will bloom well at the top once they're mature enough to reach out of the shade. One true shade-vine with scented flowers is Akebia, sometimes called chocolate-vine though to me the sweet scent isn't like chocolate. Akebia can smell just wonderful in partial to full shade, but it has a tendency to stop being perfumy very quickly so it's a most transient experience, &amp if the area isn't enclosed the scent does not accumulate enough to be noticed. So our akebia in the shade corridor between house & garage is each year briefly very wonderful smelling, but we khave another pair of them growing in a more open location & they never seem to be scented because breezes carry any scent away very rapidly.

-paghat the ratgirl

[Ann]

lgb expounded:

Blooms only, but the blooms do last quite awhile.

[Ann]

[e-mail] (paghat) expounded:

You would think wrong. I've got several extremely sweet scented hostas out there, Honeybells is the one that comes to mind, but there are others. Nor are the blooms all boring, some are quite intricately patterned. I've got over 40 varieties out there and not one of them in boring. They're also not in deep shade, that's another misconception.