Create a garden that smells as beautiful as it looks

Planting plans, fragrant plant combinations and practical advice for balconies, patios, pots and small gardens, season by season.

Start here

Start with your space, not the plant

Most garden advice begins with a plant and leaves you to work out whether it suits you. We begin with what you have: how much room, how many hours of sun, and when you sit outside. Then we tell you what to plant, where to put it, what grows well beside it and which months it will smell.

Four ways in

Small-Space Scent

Balconies, patios, pots and window boxes: what survives in a container and still fills the air with scent.

Scented Herbs

Lavender, rosemary, thyme, sage, mint and scented pelargoniums, and what to do when one of them sulks.

Scent by Season

What smells good when, from the first bulbs in February to the plants you bring in before frost.

Garden to Home

Drying lavender, tying herb bundles, filling sachets and making gifts from what you grew.

Garden by scent

Every plant on this site belongs to one of eight scent families, so you can choose by what you want to smell rather than by what happens to be in the garden centre.

Floral: rose, sweet pea, lilac, jasmine
Herbal: rosemary, thyme, sage, lavender
Citrus: lemon verbena, lemon balm, scented pelargonium
Sweet: heliotrope, sweet alyssum, honeysuckle
Spiced: dianthus and other clove-scented plants
Woodland: sweet woodruff, aromatic foliage
Mediterranean: lavender, rosemary, santolina, thyme
Night fragrance: nicotiana, jasmine, evening-scented flowers

A real garden in a real climate

We garden in southern Hungary, where winters are cold and summers are hot and dry. Our timings come from that Central European garden, and every guide tells you how to shift them to your own first and last frost.

We show balconies, patios and pots, not country estates.

Free: the 12-Month Scent Calendar

What to plant for fragrance from January to December, with each plant’s scent family, sun needs and whether it grows in a pot.