8 scented plants to place around your garden furniture set

Your own sense of smell might not be as good as your dog’s or cat’s. But you’ll still get a great deal of pleasure out of lovely niffs, especially gorgeous scents like newly-mown grass and heavily-scented flowers. Smells are incredibly evocative. Imagine creating an alfresco entertainment space in your garden surrounded by scented plants, some of which release their magic fragrances at night, others through the day?

It’s entirely possible to choose scented plants that give off lovely perfumes every month of the year, giving you lots of fragrance-led pleasure from January to December.

If your soil isn’t very good or there are no flower beds near the area you’ll be entertaining, you can always sit these in suitable-sized planters and tubs. This also makes them easier to move around if you need to.

8 scented plants for extra special alfresco living

Here are our 8 top recommendations for scented plants to go around your garden furniture, enhance the space around your chiminea or patio, and make every alfresco occasion extra special.

1. Curry plant – Honestly, this pretty shrub with its grey-green pointy leaves and delicate yellow flowers smells exactly like fragrant curry powder. When you brush past it releases its uniquely spicy scent into the air. The leaves smell strongly, as do the flowers, so it’s a great all-rounder. Evergreen, too. Don’t mix it up with the curry tree, which grows to 30 feet in hot countries. Buy the Helichrysum curry version, not the Murraya koenigii!
2. Wintersweet, also known as Chimonanthus praecox, has a lovely sweet fragrance on winter’s days. It’s quite powerful. Cut a stem and you can use it to perfume an entire room. Grow it against a south facing wall, in shelter, and give it a few years to flower. It’s well worth the wait. Or buy a big specimen and enjoy the scent sooner!
3. Hyacinths have a really strong scent, spring-like and fresh. They grow anywhere, being super-hardy, including indoors. A dramatically vivid outdoor display will provide oodles of spring colour as well as a light but powerful scent that suggests spring – evoking the good weather to come
4. Sweet peas smell totally glorious. They climb like mad, and they grow very fast. Plant them from seed for a spectacular display of climbing foliage studded with stunning, tissue-like blooms in pale jewel colours. Best of all, they keep on flowering for ages and you can use the seeds they produce the next year for another wonderful scented display
5. The Cup and Saucer vine is another vigorous climbing plant with a gorgeous scent. It produces sweet scented flowers for months on end, which look like tiny green cups and saucers. Because it climbs so fast, like sweet peas, it’s perfect for climbing up and covering trellis and growing around decorative obelisks
6. The beautiful ‘Dawn’ variant of Viburnum features beautiful, heavily scented pink flowers on bare stems from November onwards. Grow it where you habitually relax outdoors to enjoy the delicious natural scent all winter
7. Mock orange blooms through May to June, giving off a heavenly scent from its foamy white blooms. The look is tall and it can arch beautifully to provide a delicate feature that smells utterly gorgeous. The showy four-petal white flowers can be as big as 2.5cm across
8. The Chocolate Vine, AKA Akebia quinata, offers pretty purple flowers with an extraordinary vanilla-chocolate scent.In hot summers it may even fruit, giving you a crop of big, purple, sausage-shaped fruits. It’s semi evergreen in mild winters. If we get a cold one and the leaves drop off, they’ll grow back in spring

Inspired to grow scented plants for alfresco enjoyment? It can make all the difference between a great outdoor space, and an absolutely magical one. Happy growing!