Fragrant fancies

Favourite perfumed flowers

IF you want your garden to be the full package it needs more than good looks... Seductive fragrances must play a part.

Scent adds a touch of magic. It can help you relax, stir up memories and bring in visitors.

So here are the best flowers to create scented breezes.

Honeysuckle will lace the air with a sweet honey scent. You will often sense it before you see it.

Plant Lonicera periclymenum Serotina on a warm south or westfacing wall and it will produce scent for a few hours more each night.

But because blooms are such magnet to bees, you may prefer to keep the windows closed when you go to bed.

With a foil of glossy evergreen foliage, star Jasmine produces hundreds of pure white, star-shaped flowers all through the summer.

They will perfume the surrounding air with an irresistible sweet fragrance.

Use it to smother a trellis backdrop to a bench in a sunny spot.

Tipsy

To push the sensory experience to the max, plant low-growing fragrant plants such as lavender that have smoky, scented flowers and leaves that release an intoxicating perfume when you brush past.

In early summer make mock orange the star of your border. There are varieties to suit every garden, large or small.

Others have single and double blooms plus golden foliage that all impart their powerfully intoxicating orange blossom and jasmine-like fragrance.

Lilac is another must-have scented shrub that fills the air with the sound of buzzing bees and beautiful butterflies, which become tipsy on their sweet nectar.

Plants with white blooms such as lupins, nicotiana and lilies, delight in the day. But they come into their own at dusk. On moonlit nights they stand out in the border, sharing their perfume more freely after dark.

Roses come with floral, spicy or tea-like scents. Catmint, lavender, lady’s mantle and pinks make eyecatching partners for them and act as living mulches that suppress weeds and lightly shade the soil, keeping rose roots nice and cool. Another plant that demands attention is the butterfly bush, or buddleja.

As its common name implies, butterflies are drawn to the plant by its lilac fragrance and it can lure up to 22 native species to sip on the sweet nectar. The variety Lochinch is one of the best, with plenty of small flower spikes packed with tiny lavender-blue blooms with an orange eye.

If you have the space, the Black Knight variety’s blooms are set against silver foliage. It will tower up to five metres tall unless cut back hard in late spring every year to keep it in shape.