The holistic practice of aromatherapy enhances both physical and emotional health by using natural plant extracts to promote health and well-being.  By creating a fragrant garden, you can create a vibe that’s good for the body, mind and spirit, simply by choosing your landscape.

As we all know, stopping to take a few deep breaths is a good technique for managing stress. When the air is filled with the sweet smell of flowers, reminiscent of fond memories, you can’t help but stir emotions that make you feel happy.

Fragrant Garden Ideas

Surrounding a bench or front porch with fragrant flowers provides a place to take in soothing scents for a calming effect. Placing fragrant flowers upwind, can help to carry a lighter scent to your entire yard.

If the deck or patio is your favorite space, adding sweet smelling blooming flowers among other plantings will enhance the overall experience.

Planting a fragrant bloomer outside a bedroom window makes for a wonderful way to start your day or to spend a lazy summer afternoon.

Fragrant plantings along a pathway will release scent as the plants are brushed in passing.

Fragrant Garden Plant Picks

For full season aroma, we recommend working from this heady mix:

Grassy Leaved Sweet Flag

This perennial grass has iris-like gold and green striped foliage and is also a good filler for general garden use or in containers.

Lilacs

Your choices are endless and even the Common Lilac will intoxicate the entire yard and give you plenty of blooms for cutting to bring indoors or share.

Lily of the Valley

Potent and intoxicating scent, but an aggressive grower, so it is best in naturalized areas.

Merrill Magnolia

A feature tree that maintains glossy green foliage all season, but loved for its spring show of froths of fragrant white star-shaped flowers.

Dianthus

Mountain Frost Pink Carpet Pinks is wonderfully fragrant variety with  a sweet aroma and star-like flowers of pink, with red eye zones, over a carpet of sea-green foliage; great for borders, annual beds, and containers.

Fashionably Early Princess Garden Phlox

An early starting variety producing blooms of fragrant lavender-pink flower from early-late summer.

After Eight Lily

Intensely fragrant with rose-red tepals edged in white blooms that are a spectacular contrast in border plantings and excellent in containers.

Roses

We like rugosa roses for ultimate fragrance and that laid back, wild, beachy appeal.

Suaveolens Peach Brugmansia

A houseplant in the Northeast, it is an excellent candidate to bring outdoors in summer.  This tropical shrub drips in large, 12-inch trumpet-shaped white flowers that age to peach. The sweet, perfume fragrance comes out only at night and wafts gently on a summer’s evening.

Peonies

Double White is richly fragrant and while peony blooms can be short-lived, they are beloved show stoppers while they last. We recommend cutting some to bring indoors too!

Jacob Cline Beebalm

Plant in groupings for masses of beautiful clusters of fragrant red flowers from mid to late summer,  excellent for cutting to bring their pleasing scent indoors.

Lavender

Long-lasting purplish-blue blooms from early to mid-summer; dense, rich green foliage is very aromatic.

Vanilla Spice Shrub

Masses of beautiful spikes of fragrant white blooms in late summer when little else is in flower.

Scented Geranium

Another annual or houseplant option to bring outdoors in containers in the summer. We offer 20 scented varieties to choose from.

Elegant Candy Daylily

Elegant Candy Daylily features bold fragrant pink trumpet-shaped flowers with chartreuse throats and a rose ring at the ends of the stems from late spring to early fall. Excellent cutting flowers and grassy leaves offer lush green foliage throughout the season.

For more fragrant garden options, our Plant Finder Tool is an excellent way to find what makes you happy. Search our inventory, view photos, learn about the attributes of plants and create a Wish List you can send to us for purchase, print or save for your shopping trip to Studley’s!

My Pro Tip:

An herb garden outside the kitchen, in a container or on the patio provides zesty aromas to whet the appetite for fresh meals or summer barbecues.

Start with those you will most commonly use. No matter what you choose, the scent will catch and you will love having them at the ready!

See you at Studley’s!

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