Perfume your garden on a grander scale by incorporating fragrant flowers into every corner! Go big with fragrant flowering woody deciduous shrubs and bushes that not only add privacy and wildlife appeal to your garden but also have an added layer of scent!
Flowering ornamental shrubs that give off scent also attract pollinators and typically produce berries for fall interest and birds!
Check out some of Nature Hills Nursery’s favorite scented flowering shrubs and bushes!
Breathing in the fragrance of flowers has been practiced to reduce stress, fight inflammation and depression, and encourage sleep! Something we can all use in great quantities these days for our health!
Not only are these plants large enough to shield us from the world and provide us with a place to relax and forget our worries of the day, but flowering ornamental shrubs also attract 'flying flowers', songbirds, and hummingbirds and even produce edible fruit from their perfumed blossoms!
All this and you will also enjoy plenty of stems to snip and bring that redolent scent indoors for bouquets and table centerpieces! Allowing you to bring joy into your home to improve your health and wellness - mind, body, and spirit!
Why Use Flowering Shrubs As Hedges?
Why just plain evergreen plants as hedges when you can add that extra layer that flowers and fragrance add to the equation?
Hedges provide landscape structure and property definition, or create beautiful backdrops and privacy barriers! Not only screening out unwanted views but also unwanted viewers while perfuming your private spaces for a sense of seclusion and peace!
Include these perfumed gems in your garden beds for curb appeal, create outdoor walls, and carve out entire outdoor rooms with shrubs of all sizes, or include them in a Sensory Garden and just make your world a better place!
Foundation hedges of flowering shrubs add a finishing touch to your home's curb appeal while softening corners and tying your landscape up with a pretty flowering bow! Especially when those shrubs are naturally neat and tidy!
Top 5 Most Fragrant Flowering Shrubs
While Roses and Lilacs seem to get all of our (noses) attention, and sure they’re wildly fragrant and showy, there are so many other flowering shrubs that also have incredible fragrance!
Living fences and flowering privacy hedges add color to the greenery, and layering in fragrant, and easy growth are simply an added bonus!
#5 Summersweet (Clethra)
Gorgeous white bottlebrushes that explode onto the scene each year, Summersweet shrubs seem to be filled with fragrant candles of brilliant white (with the exception of the unique pinkish violet Ruby Spice). Reminiscent of Honeysuckle, these long blooming and incredibly adaptable to sun, shade, and soil, Clethra are even tolerant of urban conditions, cold climates, clay soil, and saline environments!
- Vanilla Spice® Summersweet - The largest in height and width
- Sugartina® Summersweet
- Hummingbird - The smallest growing and cold-hardiest Summersweet
- Sixteen Candles - Floriferous, cold-hardy, and rounded little shrub!
- Ruby Spice - A pink/violet flowering Summersweet!
Also known as Sweet Pepperbush, they’re irresistible to bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds!
#4 Fragrant Viburnums
Viburnum are big shrubs with textured leaves, flat umbles, or rounded clusters of blooms and berries for birds, these larger-scale adaptable versions of the hardy native have a wide range of form, interest, and benefit for your landscape!
- Burkwood like the American Spice - round clusters of star-shaped flowers
- Koreanspice - Well-known pinkish round clusters with a spicy-sweet perfume!
- Judd Viburnum are also pinkish round flower clusters with a sweet, lemony scent
- Cayuga Viburnum has dense clusters of pinkish-scented blooms!
Varieties such as Burkwood, Carlesii, Judii, and Cayuga are all very fragrant garden backbones and structures!
#3 Darling Daphne
With two fragrant offerings in their repertoire, Daphne Marianni® and Eternal Fragrance Daphne are delightfully scented flowering evergreen shrubs for hot climates! With waxy pinkish clusters of blooms similar to Viburnums, these have foliage more like waxy, thick Rhododendron leaves and a bloom time that can extend for months!
Easy-going, low-maintenance, and deer-resistant, there is little you’ll need to worry about once you get these shrubs established. These broadleaf evergreen shrubs then provide year-round greenery for the short time they’re not blooming and perfuming your landscape!
#2 Sweet Sweet Box
Aptly named Fragrant Sweet Box, three varieties are available on the Nature Hills website. All are gorgeous evergreens with glossy pointed, dense foliage and a very easy-going, resilient nature. Thriving in that tricky combination of dry shade, Sweet Box has delightfully scented flowers that can last and last! Butterflies and bees adore these blooms and deer often pass them by.
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Fragrant Mountain Sweet Box
- Fragrant Valley Sweet Box
- Fragrant Sweet Box
With a fantastic, Hyacinth-like scent, the tiny white flowers turn into bird-friendly glossy black fruit. As heat-tolerant as Daphne above, Sweet Box are xeric, small, and mid-sized shrubs that look great year-round.
#1 Gorgeous Gardenias
Our number one on the fragrant shrub list has got to be the radiant and pure white Gardenia family! These big piles of white petals carry the most intense fragrance you can imagine! Up there with Jasmine and Lily of the Valley, Gardenia blooms can perfume entire gardens and a whole room! With a cross between coconut and vanilla, a bit waxy and sweet, the intensity can almost make you light-headed! Glossy evergreen foliage fills out this broadleaf evergreen shrub and even some unique tree-form topiary trees in this family!
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Double Mint
- Aimee Gardenia
- Everblooming
- August Beauty
Single-petalled forms like Snow Girl™ and Kleim’s Hardy, and double-blooms like the illustrious August Beauty and First Editions® Double Mint, plus Everblooming Gardenias that pump out the flower power throughout the year! Great as houseplants, porch, and patio container plants, or in the ground as hedges and specimens, there’s no place too sunny for these glossy broadleaf evergreens!
Honorable Mention:
The Fragrant Tea Olive is a gorgeous evergreen with unique cupped blossoms held in scented clusters. Another broadleaf evergreen for warm climates, Tea Olives are incredibly easy-care and resilient shrubs as well!
All About Flowering Shrub Care & Maintenance
These woody stemmed deciduous plants come in a wide range of sizes and shapes! We’re certain you will find the perfect one for your unique landscaping needs.
All plants are very easy to care for once you have selected plants suited for your sun and soil requirements and your unique hardiness zone! There are Hedge Shrubs for a wide range of sun needs, however, most flowering plants need full sun to part shade to flower the most and flower the best! Many flowering bushes do amazingly in moist soil, others thrive in more Xeric conditions.
Basic Shrub Care
Low-maintenance and easy-to-grow, flowering shrubs require just a few simple steps to keep those colorful, fragrant blooms returning!
- Proper sun or shade requirements
- Fertilize in spring and again in mid-summer
- Moderate, consistent moisture for the best bloom
- A 3-4 inch thick layer of Arborist bark chip mulch year-round
- Prune back at the right time of year (some shrubs bloom on new wood while others bloom on old growth)
- Renewal Prune every 3-5 years
Follow Your Nose!
Stop and smell more than just the Roses with these easy-care ornamental Shrubs! Perfume your world with these and many more scented flowers available at Nature Hills. You will enjoy seeing … and smelling your landscape!
Keep Those Flowers Fragrant Longer
- Avoid pesticides and chemical fertilizers - they harm pollinators and take away from the shrub's fragrance
- Use drip irrigation - Avoid getting the flowers wet if able, so water at the roots. This also keeps the leaves clean and disease-free
- Time of day and weather - Flowers tend to smell better in the morning before the sun and heat of the day evaporate the volatile oils. Sun evaporates the volatile oils into the air quickly.
- Keep your cut flowers smelling great longer by trimming the stems each day. Keep your vases and water clean with daily changes, use flower food, and keep your blooms out of drafts/heating vents and full sun
Any one of these shrubs will add their beauty and fragrance to your home and garden! Turn your landscape into a paradise for more than just the eyes! Add a new dimension to your garden experience and feel the hectic world get whisked away!
Happy Planting!
