The Most Fragrant Flowers for the Home

Most people, when they choose flowers for the home, choose by sight: the colour, the form, the way a particular arrangement will look in a particular corner of a room. This is reasonable but incomplete. Scent is equally powerful and less predictable: a room in which flowers are fragrant is a different room from one in which they simply look beautiful. The best flower choices for the home address both senses, and the flowers that do fragrance most brilliantly are, in many cases, not the ones that receive the most attention.

The hierarchy of fragrant cut flowers

Fragrance intensity varies enormously between varieties of the same flower. A garden rose will outperform a commercial long-stem rose in terms of scent by a significant margin. An oriental lily will fill an entire house; an Asiatic lily has almost no scent at all. Within fragrant varieties, the strength of scent also varies by freshness, temperature, and the number of stems. The following flowers produce reliable, genuine fragrance rather than a suggestion of it.

Using fragrant flowers strategically

Fragrant flowers work best placed where air movement will carry their scent: near a slightly open window, in a hallway where doors moving create a gentle circulation, or in the kitchen where cooking smells need counterbalancing. Avoid placing very strongly scented flowers in a bedroom if you find that fragrance disrupts sleep: orientals and hyacinths in particular can be overpowering in a confined overnight space. A small posy of freesias on a desk, on the other hand, produces exactly the right quantity of scent for sustained proximity.

“A vase of scented flowers changes the quality of a room in a way that is almost impossible to replicate by any other means. It is one of the simplest domestic pleasures available.”