Popular Flower Types

There are a few things you should know about the most popular flowers in spring: They tend to be easy to grow, come in a wide range of colors and blooms, and look great in bouquets.

Whether you’re looking to plant a single stem or an entire garden bed, there’s a flower type out there for you! Take a look at this roundup of the most popular spring flowers, then head to your local nursery for more inspiration.

OUR SENSE OF SMELL is unique, evocative and sometimes intoxicating, like when you bury your nose in a heavily scented rose on a warm summer day. Fragrance might be invisible, but it’s a compelling and delightful dimension to gardening, and not just in summer.

Right now, outside in the winter garden, chilly breezes carry the spicy scent of pink dawn viburnum and the nose-twitching aroma of witch hazel. Depending on the weather, in a few weeks, the winter daphne will begin blooming — even a tiny sprig of the pink and white flowers will flood a room with its heady perfume.

Downtown at the Seattle Convention Center this week, courtesy of the Northwest Flower & Garden Festival, February smells like sweet soil and hyacinths, an olfactory illusion that launches us forward in time.

Fragrance is slippery; it’s an ephemeral and complicated topic to pin down. Individual preference and physiology determine how we each perceive scent. Further complicating matters, it’s almost impossible to describe a fragrance without redundant looping: A rose smells like a rose.

In the late 1800s, the perfume industry relied on fragrance taxonomists, experts who organized scents into categories that referenced the natural world, a common foundation that most people could relate to. In 1983, another expert, Michael Edwards, further demystified fragrance by creating “the fragrance wheel” to illustrate how families of fragrances interact with each other.

Edwards’ system is based on previously established scent categories — Floral, Fresh, Spicy and Woodsy — further divided into subsets that show a progression of related fragrances ranging from fruity to floral to spicy to warm wood, shifting to mossy wood and on to citrus and other fresh green scents. Picture a color wheel, a familiar device used to depict the relationship between various hues, only for scent.

As with color, our perception of fragrance is enlarged and enhanced by the words we use to define it. Descriptive language doesn’t just sell costly scents at the perfume counter; it lodges in our memory, establishes personal associations and helps us distinguish nuance.

Mention the smell of newly mowed lawn, and in turn you’ll likely get a collective sigh of pleasing nostalgia — not for mowing the lawn, but for that enveloping green fragrance that calls up lazy days and summer vacation. Perhaps the opposite of the onerous chore that created the scent.

THIS YEAR’S THEME for the Great Plants Picks selection program is “Scent-sational Plants,” a gardener’s guide through the world of botanical fragrance. In 2014, when GPP first featured scented plants, selections were categorized by the four traditional scent profiles already mentioned. This year’s list builds on those definitions and explores the potential of combining scents from more than one category to create a blend that’s unique to your garden.

As executive director of the Elisabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden, Richie Steffen oversees the GPP educational program, which began in 2001. “Looking at gardens, we tend to concentrate on the visual,” he says. “Even when we do think about fragrance, we think about it in a very flat way — like simply adding a row of fragrant roses to the garden.” Steffen, along with all the GPP selection committee members, wants to grow our understanding of gardening with scent.

Fragrance is dynamic. Along with sight, touch and taste, smell adds another sensual dimension to garden-making. Layering garden fragrances by selecting plants with overlapping bloom or scented foliage creates unique perceptions that shift over time depending on the season or even the time of day.

Steffen, a knowledgeable and passionate gardener, rhapsodizes about one of his favorite moments in the fall garden: when the apricot-scented blooms of tea olive (Osmanthus x fortunei) combine with the brown sugar aroma released by the katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) as their leaves drop. The sum of the two fragrances is both passing and more complex than either scent on its own. “I love those brief, spectacular moments that get me out into the garden,” Steffen says. The same could be said of that fleeting period in spring when citrus-scented magnolias are flowering. One good rain or stiff wind, and the show, both bloom and fragrance, is over until next year.

For most of us, sight is our dominant sense in the garden, and we’ll likely continue to focus on creating pleasing plant combinations based on color, form and contrast. But we can enhance our plantings by orchestrating fragrance experiences.

HERE’S A SIMPLE thought experiment: Imagine strolling through a summer garden and catching the perfume of a strongly scented rose. An underplanting of lavender, rosemary or catmint, plants that release their fragrance at the slightest touch, situated along the pathway where you’re likely to brush against their foliage, adds a resinous whiff to the sweet floral aroma of the rose. Sturdy ground covers, like Corsican mint, chamomile and creeping thyme, add herbal notes to the fragrant mix with every footstep.

Imagine the possibilities.

Flower fragrances are only the beginning. Foliage, bark and branches all lend aroma and subtle nuance to plantings. Steffen suggests brightening a combination of ornamental salvias or Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia), plants whose leaves smell strongly of sage, with a plant whose flowers have citrus notes, like our native mock orange (Philadelphus spp.). “It’s like adding a squeeze of lemon over a roast chicken,” Steffen observes. Flavor and fragrance are closely related. According to the GPP website, Philadelphus ‘Belle Etoile’ is a hybrid with excellent fragrance, a longer flowering period and a more compact growing habit than other mock oranges.

Fragrance fatigue is real. Scented plants with a long bloom season can overstay their welcome. “It’s tempting to want to plant something really fragrant, like sweetbox (Sarcococca spp.), right by the front door so you catch the scent every time you come and go, but you might get tired of the scent by the end of winter,” Steffen cautions. “Instead, I like the idea of placing a Sasanqua camellia near an entryway.” Camellia sasanqua ‘Setsugekka’, a GPP selection, begins blooming in early November and carries on through January. Glossy evergreen foliage creates a dramatic foil to large, semidouble white blooms that have a delicious spicy scent. “The fragrance doesn’t permeate the air like sweetbox does; you have to almost embrace a Sasanqua to catch their exquisite scent,” he adds.

SEVERAL PLANTS HAVE been added to this year’s GPP roster of fragrant plants. Native throughout the U.S. and Canada, red baneberry (Actaea rubra) is prized for the fire-engine red berries that ripen in late summer, but Steffen says the delicate white blossoms that appear in spring have a rosy fragrance. The blooms on Magnolia x soulangeana ‘Rustica Rubra’ and M. ‘Vulcan’ both have a wonderful citrusy scent, although Steffen points out that the rounded growing habit of ‘Rustica Rubra’, an older cultivar, is more conducive to sniffing, as the branches and blooms hang down within reach. “Vulcan magnolia has an upright growth habit, so eventually the flowers are going to be out of reach,” he notes.

Then there are those fragrances that are, quite literally, in your face, like lilies. ‘Scheherazade’ is an orienpet, a hybrid trumpet and Oriental lily, that towers to nearly 8 feet in the garden, spilling its potent perfume in late summer. Another lily, ‘Silk Road’, is powerfully fragrant but stands at a more demure 6 feet tall.

The blooms of Eternal Fragrance daphne (Daphne ´ transatlantica ‘Blafra’ ETERNAL FRAGRANCE™) emit an enticing scent beginning in spring and carrying on into summer. Steffen recommends Eternal Fragrance for gardeners who haven’t had much luck growing other daphnes. Sweetly scented white blooms blushed with pink begin flowering in late April and continue to a lesser but no less fragrant degree all summer. Unlike most daphnes that prefer partial shade and can be fussy, Eternal Fragrance can take full sun and doesn’t require pampering, provided it has well-drained soil. Steffens characterizes the fragrance as a spicier floral than that of winter daphne.

BACK TO THE winter garden, the one outside our windows just now. Pink dawn viburnum (Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’) produces a continuous display of shell-pink flowers that tease the cold air with an incenselike scent. The display, both flowers and fragrance, which begins in mid-November and continues into early April, is never extravagant. Occasionally, an Arctic freeze will blast all the open blossoms, but because the buds don’t bloom all at the same time, another round of flowers appears when temperatures normalize.

Dreaming up garden fragrance combinations is an excellent way to bide our time until spring. In addition to compiling a wish list of plants, work on building your scent vocabulary and watch your enjoyment of the fragrant garden flourish. You’ll find the 2023 GPP poster for “Scent-sational Plants” on the inside front and back cover of this magazine. Visit greatplantpicks.org for more inspiration and growing advice on hundreds of outstanding plants that thrive in maritime Pacific Northwest gardens.

Source: seattletimes.com