Fresh Scents for Your Home Use Fragrant Plants
Fresh Scents for Your Home Use Fragrant Plants
There are concerns these days over the health and safety of artificial home scents, such as plug-ins and scented candles, and also there are many people with allergies to these synthetic scents. If you like a good-smelling home but want natural scents, planting fragrant plants near your windows and doors is one lovely way to achieve it. Here are some ideas and suggestions for creating fresh scents for your home through fragrant plants.
- Along the Walkway- Along the walkway to your house you can plant some low-growing, nicely-scented plants that will release their fragrance when stepped on. Thyme, pennyroyal, sweet woodruff, and Corsican mint are good options for this. Planting fragrant flowers along your walkway provides a welcoming and fragrant entrance to your home.
- Window Boxes- Fill window boxes with sweet-smelling plants like sweet alyssum, scented geraniums, and marigolds. For kitchen windows, culinary herbs like rosemary, lemon balm, basil, and mint are very fragrant (and you can reach out the open window and collect some as you cook!). For a bedroom window, try lavender – it promotes sleep and you can open the window at night to let the fragrance in.
- Under Windows- Night-blooming plants are wonderful under windows, where the scent can waft in when it’s dark. Evening primrose, night-blooming jasmine, and wallflowers are some of the possibilities. For daytime scent, lavender, basil, peonies, and phlox are good options. Bergamot or bee balm is a tall, bright-flowering member of the mint family that will add lots of amazing scent to your home when you open your windows – it smells like Earl Grey tea. Wisteria is a very fragrant vine that you can grow under and around windows. The purple blooms will hang in front of the windows.
- Doorways- At your doorway, it’s nice to have plants with a welcoming fragrance. You can put a trellis over and around your doorway and cover it with honeysuckle, jasmine, sweet pea, climbing roses, or clematis. Or you can plant sage, mints, and oregano at your doorway. People will brush against these plants as they enter, bringing the scent with them.
You can also have a scented shrub on either side of your doorway, like bay, lilac, shrub roses, and butterfly bush. If you’re looking for an easy way to plant these without breaking your back, I have found that using an auger makes this job simple. Tech Team https://techteamproducts.com/ manufactures these in 2 models. both 3” diameter. Their item 777 https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Team-Planter-Seedlings-Planters/dp/B07S385BW7/ref=sr_1_197?keywords=bulb+auger&qid=1568384841&s=gateway&sr=8-197 which is 9” long, and their item 778 https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Team-Planter-Seedlings-Planters/dp/B07S386MWG/ref=sr_1_53?keywords=bulb+auger&qid=1568384749&s=gateway&sr=8-53 which is 24”. Both are excellent and get the job done.
Surrounding your home’s entry points with scented plants and flowers is a wonderful and natural way to bring fresh fragrance into your home. To get some other plant ideas do a Hey Siri or Hey Alexa search for “Fragrant flowering plants” for your specific location or zip code. Good online sources for plants and seeds include Stokes, Burpee, Eden Brothers, and Park Seeds.
