How to Plant a Perfume Garden

Use spent flowers and petals to make your own potpourri.

When you create a perfume garden, you create beauty and enjoyment that engages several human senses. The sense of smell is heightened by the aromas and fragrances you pick-up. The eyes behold the beauty of the flowers and foliage. The smell of herbs in the garden also activates a third sense -- the sense of taste. Plant your perfume garden to engage all three senses and turn your home's landscape into a source of triple pleasure.

Instructions

1. Plan your garden and purchase the desired plants by thinking about the types of floral and herbal fragrances you love to smell. Let your nose lead you to think about how the type of perfume garden you really want to create. Consider whether you want to focus on flowers and plantings that provide fragrance and enhance your landscape, flowers to use for a cutting garden to make floral arrangements to bring indoors, foliage that exudes aromatic smells of herbs to use for cooking, or a combination of multiple purposes.

2. Examine your landscape to locate the best space for your perfumed garden. Choose areas that get at least six hours of sun. Use more than one area to create "mini" perfume gardens for different purposes.

3. Select fragrant shrubs to serve as the "backbone" of the perfume garden and to give the garden height and structure. Plant shrubs to border the exterior walls of your home to create a perfume garden flower bed for the front or backyard. Plant the shrubs close enough to walking paths so that guests can smell the fragrance when they approach your front door or walk through your back yard.

4. Plant shrubs and bushes that will establish a sense of permanency for your perfume garden and a smell that people will associate with visiting your home. Choose from summer blooming shrubs such as gardenia, jasmine, wisteria or honeysuckle. Plant a classic lilac bush or an heirloom rose bush. Consider the Gertrude Jekyll rose variety as a proven performer that has a heavy and heavenly fragrance, deep rich color and wide double blooms.

5. Add depth and dimension to your perfume garden by creating beds of fragrant flowers. Include medium-height plants for cutting, such as tuber roses, stock, peony, hyacinth and sweet pea. Space flowers for cutting closer together so there won't be any sparse areas once you cut the flowers indoors to create floral arrangements.

6. Plant bulbs such as crocus and tuber roses to provide spring fragrance. Mix in non-fragrant bulbs such as tulips and canna lilies for height and so the fragrances of the different plantings don't compete for attention.

7. Use the front of the flower bed to plant crocus bulbs to provide fragrance in spring. Plant fragrant ground covers after the bulbs go dormant. Select from sweet woodruff, heliotrope or wooly thyme.

8. Select a spot in the backyard and close to the kitchen to create an herbal perfume garden. Snip off leaves to add garden-fresh aroma and flavor to foods cooked indoors and on the barbecue grill. Choose fragrant herbal plantings such as sage, rosemary, thyme, mint and basil. Consider planting the herbs in containers, a window box, or an old vintage wooden barrel for a decorative touch. Add a trellis with a climbing roses or a clematis to give height to the herbal perfume garden.

9. Include white flower selections, fragrant and non-fragrant, among flowers with color to give the garden definition, light the garden at night and make it stand out under the moonlight.

Tips & Warnings

• Use arbors and trellises for added height and to define separate perfume garden spaces.

• Study the blooming season for selected plants.

• Stage plantings so that flowers don't all bloom at the same time and fragrances don't compete. Include non-fragrant plants to give the garden balance.

References

• Clemson Cooperative Extension: Jasmine; Marjan Kluepfel, September, 1999.
• Colorado State University Cooperative Extension: The Early Cottage Garden; Bonnie Ennis; January 5, 2010.
• Michigan State University 4H Garden: Perfume Garden
• Burkes Backyard: Perfumed Plants
• Holmes Hollow: The Perfumed Garden; Andrew Fowler, January 15, 2009.
• Missouri Botanical Garden: Rosa 'Ausbord' Gertrude Jekyll

Resources

• UK Telegraph: Christian Dior's Perfumed Garden