Gardeners tend to focus on how plants look — how the colors and visual textures of their foliage and flowers combine and complement

each other. Yet, when you’re selecting plants, if you don’t also consider fragrance, touch, sound and taste, you’re only getting one-fifth of the sensory delights your garden has to offer.

Using plant combinations that engage all five senses helps create a more engaging, interactive experience for gardeners, says Mark Dwyer, horti-culture director at the Rotary Botanical Gardens in Janesville. Dwyer is trying to make that point with a two-year garden exhibit: The Smelly Garden. Packed with flowering trees and shrubs, perennials, annuals, bulbs and herbs, the garden even includes 70 hands-on containers that invite visitors to stop and rub the leaves, smell the roses and enjoy the garden in a whole new way.By Patrice Peltier

Looks aren’t everything — Mom told you that. Who knew she

was talking about gardening? Consider fragrance, touch, sound and taste to get all of the sensory

delights in your garden.

Gardening for the Senses

Spiny leaves and spiky flowers make small globe thistle (Echinops ritro) a flower you might not want

to touch, but, as you can see, pollinators love it.

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Wisconsin Gardening • July/August 2012 13

FragranceJust as you can plan for a progression of blooms

through the season, you can also achieve a progres-sion of fragrance, Dwyer notes. He starts with spring-flowering shrubs such as lilacs, fragrant viburnums and a personal favorite, fragrant abelia (Abelia mosa-nensis), which he notes is only hardy to Zone 5. For summer, the fragrance focus shifts to annuals such as flowering nicotiana, heliotropes and carnations. Dwyer makes liberal use of lemon bergamot (Monarda citriodora), (which is not hardy here) as well as peren-nial monardas, such as Monarda bradburiana ‘Prairie Gypsy’. He appreciates monardas for their fragrant foliage, culinary uses and attraction for pollinators.

Other perennials Dwyer uses for fragrance include tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa) and Jupiter’s beard (Centranthus ruber). Several Oriental lilies also offer fragrance. Dwyer is especially fond of Lilium regale ‘Album’, a tall and sturdy trumpet lily.

Some plants provide fragrance — or become most fragrant — in the evening. Plants such as moon-flower (Ipomoea alba), night phlox (Zaluzianskya capensis) and old-fashioned flowering tobacco (Nicotiana sylvestris) add special pleasure for those whose gardening time may be limited to the evening hours as well as those who enjoy outdoor evening entertaining.

By late summer, most of the fragrance comes from annuals and herbs, and by frost, well, the garden isn’t smelly any more, Dwyer says. “Frost knocks the perennials back, and the annuals are mush,” he says with regret. He does, however, strive to have plants that are fragrant from May through mid-October.

TouchGardens can also offer a variety of tactile sensa-

tions. Woolly lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina) is often grown for its soft, fuzzy texture. Dwyer also likes woolly sage also called silver sage (Salvia argentea). “It has huge furry leaves. Everybody has to touch it,” he says.

When the garden hosts students from the nearby school for the visually impaired, students touch the rough leaves of cardoon, the prickly flowers of globe thistle (Echinops ritro), sea holly (Eryngium maritimum) and rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuc-cifolium), the smooth, waxy leaves of bergenia and magnolia, and the sandpapery foliage of pulmonarias and brunnera.

Continued on page 16.

Top, right: Old-fashioned flowering tobacco (Nicotiana sylvestris) is an eye-catching way to

add fragrance. Right: People can’t resist touch-ing the large, furry leaves of woolly sage (Salvia

argentea) at the Rotary Botanical Gardens. Horticulture Director Mark Dwyer uses the plant

liberally to encourage just this kind of interaction.

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Botanical Name Common Name

Agastache astromontana ‘Pink Pop’ hyssop

Amarcrinum hybrida Crinodonna lily

Anethum graveolens ‘Fernleaf’ dill

Antirrhinum ‘Fresh Lemon’ fragrant snapdragon

Asclepias incarnata ‘Cinderella’ ornamental milkweed

Ballota nigra ‘Archer’s Variegated’ variegated horehound

Berlandiera lyrata chocolate daisy

Brachycome iberidifolia ‘Little Missy’ swan river daisy

Centranthus ruber Jupiter’s beard

Cosmos atrosanguineus chocolate cosmos

Crinum powellii ‘Album’ cape lily

Cymbopogon citratus lemon grass

Dianthus amurensis ‘Siberian Blues’ fragrant pinks

Dianthus barbatus ‘Sweet Mix’ sweet William

Eucalyptus citriodora ‘Lemon Bush’ lemon eucalyptus

Foeniculum vulgare dulce bronze fennel

Galtonia candicans summer hyacinth

Gladiolus murielae peacock orchidHedychium coronarium ‘White Butterfly’

white ginger

Hedychium ‘Pink V’ ginger lily

Iberis amara ‘Iceberg Superior’ annual candytuft

Lathyrus odoratus ‘Cupani’ sweet pea

Lilium ‘Belgrado’ Oriental lily

Linaria hybrida ‘Enchantment’ toadflax

Lupinus hartwegii ‘Sunrise’ lupine

Come Have a Sniff

The Smelly Garden at the Rotary Botanical Gardens in Janesville includes more than 180 kinds of fragrant plants. You can get some ideas from this partial plant list, but for the full effect, visit the gardens at 1455 Palmer Drive in Janesville. For more information, go

to www.rotarybotanicalgardens.org.

Botanical Name Common Name

Matthiola incana ‘Vintage Mix’ stocks

Mirabilis jalapa ‘Limelight’ four o’clocks

Nepeta cataria ‘Lemon Scented’ lemon catnip

Nepeta nervosa ‘Blue Carpet’ catmint

Nepeta x hybrida ‘Pink Candy’ catmint

Nerine bowdenii cape lilyOriganum laevigatum ‘Herrenhausen’

ornamental oregano

Origanum syriaca ‘Zaatar’ marjoram

Pandorea jasminoides ‘Variegata’ variegated bower vine

Pelargonium ‘Frank Headley’ scented geranium

Petroselinum crispum ‘Krausa’ triple-curled parsley

Petunia axillaris ‘Rainmaster’ fragrant petunia

Phlox drummondii ‘Phlox of Sheep’ annual phlox

Plectranthus caninus dogbane

Poliomintha longiflora Mexican oregano

Pycnanthemum muticum mountain mint

Reseda odorata ‘Grandiflora’ mignonette

Salvia officinalis ‘Sage of Bath’ garden sage

Santolina rosmarinifolia santolina, lavender cotton

Sphaeralcea coccinea ‘Desert Sunset’

scarlet globemallow

Thymus hybrida ‘Spicy Orange’ orange thymeTrachelium caeruleum ‘Devotion Mixture’

throatwort

Tulbaghia violacea ‘Variegata’ variegated society garlic

The Smelly Garden at Rotary Botanical Gardens in Janesville offers lots of ideas for fragrant plants to

add to your own garden. Seventy containers (in the background) invite visitors to find out for them-

selves which parts of the plants are fragrant.

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Wisconsin Gardening • July/August 2012 15

likes for its variegated foliage. He’s also a fan of Panicum vir-gatum ‘Northwind’, a grass introduced by Wisconsin plantsman Roy Diblik who admired the plant’s ability to remain upright throughout the winter.

The seedheads of northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) offer a distinctive rustle in the breeze, according to Dwyer. He also likes the way the drying seedpods of false indigo (Baptisia aus-tralis) rattle in the wind or when someone brushes past them.

TasteMany herbs, vegetables and fruits have ornamental traits,

while some ornamental annuals and perennials are edible. Gardeners are increasingly blurring the lines between decorative gardening and food production. “Instead of just looking nice, you might as well get double duty,” Dwyer says.

He points to new Swiss chard cultivars such as ‘Bright Lights’ and ‘Neon Lights’, with their colorful leaves and stems, as examples of plants that are edible and attractive. Basil is another. “There are so many kinds of basil — lemon, lime, licorice and purple-leaved,” Dwyer notes. He likes incorporating different basils for the culinary value as well as for fragrance and the many colors and textures of its foliage.

Roses, nasturtiums, calendulas, tuberous begonias and monardas all have edible flowers — although as Dwyer points out, most gardeners probably prefer to enjoy their flowers in the garden not on their plates.

Of course, we want our gardens to look beautiful, but we don’t have to stop there. We can also choose plants that will entice us with their fragrance, delight us with their flavors, invite us to feel their textures and soothe us with their sounds. Why not have a garden of (all five) sensory delights?

Patrice Peltier is a freelance garden writer based in Colgate.

SoundWho isn’t soothed by the sound of trickling water? Today,

there are so many ways for gardeners to incorporate this sound. You can purchase a tabletop or wall-mounted fountain to install yourself on your deck or patio. You can make your own water garden in a whiskey barrel or other container or create a small water feature.

“Water, especially in an urban or suburban property, can also help mask unattractive sounds. It creates a white noise that can block out street noise or the sound of your neighbor’s lawn mower as you sit on your patio,” points out Landscape Designer James M. Drzewiecki of Ginkgo Leaf Studio in Cedarburg.

The volume of water — rushing versus trickling — the amount of water and the surface the water is falling on — a pool of water, a boulder or a bed of pea gravel, for instance — all affect the sound that water makes, according to Drzewiecki.

A crackling fire is another way to engage the sense of sound. The scent of burning wood entices our sense of smell while the warmth of the fire engages our tactile senses. Again, there are many ways to incorporate fire in your landscape — from a rustic fire ring to a portable, decorative fire pit to a permanent outdoor fireplace.

“The heat of a fire really extends the usefulness of a patio — not only late into the season but early in the season as well,” notes Drzewiecki. What’s more, a carefully chosen or well-designed fire pit can function as a sculptural element in the landscape even when it’s not being used for a fire, he says.

Many plants have sounds, too, both Dwyer and Drzewiecki note. Drzewiecki likes the way large ornamental grasses sway and rustle in the wind. Some of his favorites include Calamagrostis brachytricha, which he likes for its wide seed heads, and Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Avalanche’, which he

Left: The sound of water can vary depending upon factors like the volume of water and what the water falls on, says land-scape designer James Drzewiecki. Right: Basils, such as this Ocimum ‘Petra Dark Purple’, can serve many purposes, offering fragrance, foliage color and flavor in the garden.

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