My Scented Garden

I love scent- out in the garden especially. Not one to use lots of perfumes on my person, but love for the waft of fragrance on the air. Not surprisingly then, I have opted towards planting my garden with things that smell good. Right now, lily of the valley and sweet woodruff weave an enticing spell outside my front door.

Both of these plants were gift plants from my mother when she had a garden. The lily of the valley has, after four or more years finally taken on its reputation for a spreading groundcover. It took that long for my few pips to spread, but now I have hefty stands that are all blooming.

The sweet woodruff is one of my favorite plants, and in my garden conditions is a polite sort of groundcover. I grow it under what is left of my roses in the newly renovated leeward flower bed. It is where the colored foliaged heuchera, variegated hydrangea and foxgloves are now installed. English ivy is creeping in and that will have to be controlled. But the sweet woodruff is blooming with a clean white sheet of bloom along with scilla hispanica punctuating little exclamation marks here and there, to say “Springtime and soon SUMMER!”