10 top scented plants to transform your garden and lift your mood

Scented plants evoke memories. They can be calming or relaxing, and a favourite fragrance can lift your mood. And pollinators use scent to find pollen and nectar. But plants today are often bred without fragrance or with very little scent.

Tony Hall of Kew Botanic Gardens has written Gardening With Scented Plants. Here he picks out 10 of the best scented plants for your garden and answers some of the common questions about transforming your garden with fragrance.

00:00 Why scented plants matter
00:15 Royal Botanic Gardens Kew: https://www.kew.org/
00:19 Gardening With Scented Plants: https://amzn.to/42IgjXG (affiliate link, see below)
00:59 Why scent is being lost in garden plants
01:53 How to plan a scented garden
03:32 Scented plants for winter
04:58 Scented plants for spring
05:35 Scented plants for summer
06:45 Scented plants for autumn
07:34 Do scented plants need sun or shade?
08:27 Do scented plants need any special care or soil?
08:50 Good night-flowering scented plants
09:15 Do scented plants grow in pots?
10:44 Do scented plants attract more wasps?
11:22 Will scented plants make my hay fever worse?
11:58 25 Cottage Garden Plants: https://youtu.be/8dXI5_bPSdQ

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Scented plants evoke memories. They create 
nostalgia. They can help reduce stress. And they’re surprisingly important for wildlife. But a 
lot of plants today aren’t scented. It’s Alexandra here from The Middle-Sized Garden YouTube channel 
and blog, and I’m at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew with Tony Hall, author of Gardening with 
Scented Plants. Gardening with Scented Plants has over 200 plant profiles, and the plants are 
grown in temperate gardens all over the world. And the book will tell you exactly how to choose and 
grow the plants. And there are also useful charts on which plants flower in which months. And also 
how you can choose scented plants by colour. When I came to Kew Gardens a couple of months ago, the 
winter garden which Tony was responsible for was absolutely looking gorgeous, but it was the scent 
that drew me in. It was amazing. And so I’m very excited to be back here to talk more about what 
scent can do in garden design. So Tony, start by telling me why you wrote this book. There’s a few 
reasons. One, I’m a beekeeper, so I obviously you know like to have plants grown in my garden that 
are good for bees. But also growing up, I remember how scented plants used to be, but nowadays plant 
breeders tend to grow plants more for show. So they’re bigger, more colourful, bigger range of 
colours – uh some pest disease – but there are fewer and fewer plants bred nowadays that are 
fragrant plants, and plants that I can remember from my childhood. So it was really around that, 
you know, to have a garden full of scented plants is amazing. I mean it is lovely to have flowers 
that last longer, but the way the plant breeders have bred a lot of the plants now – they’ve kind 
of lost the scent for the longevity of the plant. So it was really to show people the wide range of 
plants all year round that you could have in your garden that are just wonderfully scented. So 
how would you plan a scented garden – if you were designing for scent – because obviously you 
don’t actually need every plant to be scented do you? Yeah, if you had a scented garden that would 
be just full of only scented plants, and there would be quite a lot of conflict I would think 
between all different fragrances, and it might be completely overpowering. So I think the thing 
is you need to have a mixed garden. So a mixture of everything – you know: annuals, bulbs, shrubs, 
perennial flowers. And have kind of mixed borders, or mixed shrub borders, where you just put 
certain plants in whether they be dot plants, you know like philadelphus – it will flower 
in April/May, and then it’s gone, and then it can be followed by lots of other plants. I 
mean there is a vast array of different ones, but I think the thing is not to have everything 
scented. You need to have a bit of a mixture. And presumably also to have the scent where you will 
be passing it; so maybe outside the back door, near the seating area, on the edges of borders 
– things like that? I mean things like you know at your back door as you go out in the garden. If 
you have a climbing plant on the wall – could be a wisteria, or a rose, or a jasmine – something like 
that. Something that’s really nice and scented. In patio gardens, you need to have things close 
to where you’re going to be sitting or working. You mentioned along pathways where perhaps 
you’ve got things like cat mints, or lavenders, and roses – things that you can brush against 
and let the scent out. Because it’s not just flowers – it’s also the foliage where the scent 
comes from. So if we go through the plants, say season by season, and start of course with 
winter – which you might think there are no scented plants – but the winter garden that you 
created here at Kew was just amazing. Yeah. And it did envelop – it was absolutely in the air 
– the scent. So what were the plants that you planted there and that you would recommend for 
people in their gardens? I think winter is a great time. I mean a lot of gardeners – whether 
they’re professional or amateur gardeners, or just weekend gardeners – think winter’s a time 
to put away your tools and shut the garden down. But it’s actually a time not only for colour 
but a wonderful time for fragrance. The plants that produce their fragrance in the winter have to 
work twice as hard as those that do in the summer, because there’s much fewer pollinators around. 
So they are putting out more scent to draw in more pollinators. So yeah, the air is completely 
filled. Things like chimonanthus winter sweet is a wonderful one. Some of the sweet box is another 
good scented plant. All the hamamelis. Lots of viburnums – different types of viburnums. Lots of 
different scents. There’s a wonderful one called edgeworthia, the paper-bark bush, which has almost 
like small pom-pom clusters of long-tubed flowers, that just have so much scent. You can 
smell them easily from 10-15 yards away, and the air is completely full. So, there is so 
much, yeah, winter is definitely not a time not to be gardening, And I’d say now look at some 
recommendations you can make for, say, four or five really good spring plants that people might 
use for fragrance. There’s bulbs like lily of the valley – convallaria is a very good one – if 
you have a shady area in a woodland type setting. Lilacs are a great one. Again lilacs were a plant 
that have gone out of fashion slightly, and some of the newer bred ones have less scent, but 
they’re a great cottage garden plant for spring, early summer. Paperwhite narcissi – brilliant one. 
And the nice thing about those, they will actually start flowering in November, and they will flower 
right the way through Christmas, and they will flower right through into April. They’re a great 
cut flower. You know, a bunch of those will fill a room with scent. And in terms of summer flowering 
plants, when I was looking at the charts that you have in Gardening with Scented Plants – yeah – it 
was amazing. You know, there was a few dozen in most months, and then we got into June/July and 
August and it was literally hundreds of plants that are scented, that flower then. But would you 
be able to pick out, say, three that you could really recommend anyone to have in their garden? 
I think lilies, the giant lilies, the regal lily is definitely one. Again it makes a really good 
cut flower. Heavily heavily scented. There is one downside with that – the pollen is quite staining, 
so you have to make sure that you don’t get the pollen on your clothes. Roses. Everybody knows, 
you could probably almost have a rose that will flower from spring right through till autumn. 
And there’s just such a wide variety of different fragrances through the roses. All the jasmines 
– the star jasmine, which is trachelospermum, and the the common jasmine, which is jasmine 
officinale – both those are super fragrant. And again they’re a plant that you can grow up 
a wall, over a fence, over a pergola. So even in a small garden, if you’re limited for space, 
they’re a really good one. They’ll even grow in a pot. And then when we get into autumn, what would 
you say three or four really good scented plants? My favourite plant for the autumn is one called 
clerodendrum. I think it’s called, common name, is something like the harlequin glory-bower. It 
has some has sweetly scented flowers that are, I mean, they’re exquisite. The scent from them is 
absolutely exquisite, and it absolutely fills the air around. And also if you crush the leaves they 
smell of peanut butter. So it’s quite an unusual one. Not a flower, but cercis siliquastrum. 
The leaves on that, as it goes into autumn, it’s a really good one for people walking around. 
And they can smell like a candy floss smell in the air, but there’s no flowers at all. And it is 
literally just the leaves of the cercis going into autumn. What about sun and shade? There is a 
choice for either. Most fragrant plants do best in the sun – full sun is the best. The fragrance 
that flowers give off comes from the petals, and flowers have this ability to know exactly 
what type of insect they’re performing to, if you like. So obviously the night scented flowers 
will flower in the evening for the moths, but the summer flowering ones in full sun will produce 
most of their fragrance almost around midday. So they know when most insects are out. So generally, 
full sun for most. But there are quite a few – I mean if you think of some of the woodlandy type 
plants, things like skimmias, things like some of the winter plants we spoke about earlier – 
they will take partial shade. There isn’t much that will take full shade, that’s really good for 
scent. A lot of the climbers will take partial shade – as long as it gets some sun through the 
day, that’s absolutely fine. Do scented plants need any special care or soil? Not really, I mean 
it depends. If you’re growing things like lilacs, and they like an alkaline soil, and so do 
daphnes which is the winter flowering one, and rhododendrons like acid soils. So as long as 
you’re picking plants for your soil type – whether it be acid or whether it be alkaline – then there 
isn’t any special need for them, no. And you mentioned the night flowering one. What would be 
a couple of good night flowering plants? I mean, there are some in their names that are an 
absolute giveaway. You got night-scented stock, night-scented phlox, evening primrose. So that’s 
three straight away. The jasmines again would be very good. The tobacco plants very good. So yeah, 
they’re the kind of plants that you do want to have close to an area where you’re sitting, and 
enjoying a warm summer’s evening. What about scented flowers in pots? Is there anything we 
need to know about it – is it just like growing any other plants in pots? It’s more or less like 
growing any other plants. I mean if you’re going to have a shrub for instance in a container, it 
needs to have a good loam-based compost – probably one of the John Innes number two or number three. 
Roses would do very well in pots, but because they’re quite a deep rooted plant they kind of 
need quite a decent sized pot – maybe 75 cm, something like that. So I think as long as you’ve 
got the right soil conditions you can grow almost any plant in a pot within reason. You can grow 
climbers in pots, annuals in pots, obviously lots of bedding plants. Petunias are scented – they 
can grow in pots. Lavenders. I think the thing is, the nice thing about growing things in pots, if 
you only have a patch or a very small garden, not a lot of soil obviously, you can grow them in 
pots but you can also move them around. Obviously not if they’re in huge pots, and you’ve got 
biggish plants in. But even things like magnolias, magnolia stellata, which is a wonderful late 
spring flowering plant, slightly scented, very very pretty. They do very well in 
pots. You do actually get plants now, they sell as patio plants, but again because a 
lot of these plants are bred to be kept smaller, they don’t always have the same amount of scent. 
So stick to the plants you know that have a good scent and grow them in your containers. If you’re 
buying a plant in the garden centre, the easy thing is to give it a sniff. If there’s no scent, 
don’t buy it. Some people are worried that scented plants might attract more wasps. Wasps are not 
really pollinators. They’re not like bees, moths and butterflies which are the main pollinators – 
and so are hoverflies actually. Wasps mainly live on insects, other insects and spiders, which they 
feed their lava. So they actually do drink some nectar themselves for energy. They’re not visiting 
the flowers for the scent. They’re visiting just because there may be insects there which they’re 
going to take back to their nest, or they’re there just to have a little drink of nectar. They’re not 
attracted to scented plants in any way. They’ll go to any plant, and every plant. And in terms of hay 
fever, if someone’s a hay fever sufferer can they plant scented plants – is that any correlation? 
I’m a hay fever sufferer. I’ve gardened all my life. No, I don’t think so. You know we spoke 
earlier about how much scent the plants put around the outside of the plant. So you don’t need to 
stick your head into a plant to sniff it. So no, I couldn’t have a garden without scented plants 
in. I’ll put a link in the description below to Tony’s book Gardening with Scented Plants, and 
also to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. And if you’re interested in more plants that are 
good for cottage gardens, then don’t miss this video coming up next – 25 best cottage garden 
plants. And thank you for watching. Goodbye!