By Mike Raley
Anyone who has ever listened to the WPTF Weekend Gardener for any length of time knows I love fragrance in the winter landscape. Actually, I have always had a fondness for the winter landscape. The hues of brown and gray, sprinkled with contrasting evergreens and cover crops of rye, help make the countryside look sort of neat, clean and orderly.
If you are not a fan of winter landscapes, maybe adding some plants that produce amazing smells will help change your mind. There are actually so many to choose from. My personal favorite is the wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox), or Japanese allspice, a native of China and Japan. It is a member of the Calycanthaceae family, just like the Carolina allspice, spice bush or sweet shrub. There are a few cultivars around including “Grandiflorus” and “Luteus.” Yes, it is a deciduous, gangly shrub with little visual interest except for a few weeks in January and hopefully lasting into February. I have been the proud owner of a wintersweet for decades. It gets bigger and produces more flowers every year. When it starts to bloom, I pick a few flowers or a handful and bring them inside. Some people say the blooms have a lemony fragrance. You know what it smells like to me? A piece of banana kit candy! For the uninitiated, banana kits are a taffy candy from my childhood that came in various flavors. I think it’s still made. How pleasant it is every year to watch in anticipation for the first few blooms. A hard freeze will kill the blooms, but until then it’s sheer nirvana!
The wintersweet is a low-maintenance shrub that will grow 10 to 15 feet tall and 10 to 12 feet wide. It prefers full sun, and well-drained soil once the root system is established. It deals well with dry conditions. It does need watering occasionally as a new planting. The soil pH doesn’t seem to matter. As I mentioned, it gets leggy as it grows older. If you want to avoid this shape, prune every couple of years or so in late winter after the flowers have faded. Or you can drastically prune it. Mine is close to the front driveway at my house, so the only time I touch it is when an errant limb grows out too far or if a limb dies. When planting the wintersweet, be sure to dig the hole twice as wide as the root ball and deep enough for the top of the root ball to peak over the top of the hole. You may place something like Permatill at the bottom of the hole, add water and fill in with dirt, compost and organic matter like Daddy Pete’s or Black Kow. Add two to three inches of hardwood mulch. I don’t often fertilize anything, especially when a flowering shrub is involved. If you do fertilize, use a low-nitrogen type. Nitrogen will produce lots of green leaves, but it doesn’t help produce blooms.
Finally, the wintersweet is virtually pest free, so plant with the confidence that it will be around for a long time and give you great-smelling pleasure year after year.