Summersweet
Clethra alnifolia
Sweet, spicy July fragrance that carries on warm evenings and pulls in every bee nearby. Handles full shade, wet feet, and turns yellow in fall.
Typically 1 quart–3 gal · $17–$85 · final price at pickup
- Thu, Aug 138 AM – 4 PM
- Fri, Aug 148 AM – 4 PM
- Sat, Aug 158 AM – 2 PM
Fragrant midsummer blooms, bee and butterfly value, wet-site tolerance, fall color, and four-season presence. summersweet checks more boxes than almost any other native shrub.
Summersweet earns its name twice over. The fragrance from those white flower spikes in July and August is one of the great smells of the summer garden: sweet and spicy with a quality that carries surprising distance on a warm evening. Walk past it once with the flowers open and you'll understand why every single bee in the neighborhood has already found it. It's one of the most versatile flowering shrubs in our inventory: handles full shade and wet feet, spreads into a colony that stabilizes moist areas, and provides yellow fall color before going dormant. Planted along streams, in rain garden edges, or massed at the back of a border, it forms an ecological anchor that provides nectar, structure, and cover across all four seasons.
A nursery-grown plant, ready for the ground.
Healthy, container-grown summersweet propagated on-site at Hill House from regional genetics. Includes a one-page care card. We make every effort to supply plants as listed; occasionally we substitute a similar species of equal value.
- Sun
- Full sun
- Water
- Average
- Mature size
- 4–8 ft · 4–8 ft wide
- Bloom time
- Midsummer through late summer
- Bloom color
- White
- USDA zones
- 3–9
- Family
- Clethraceae
- Native range
- Eastern North America
Care notes for summersweet.
Full sun to full shade in moist to wet, acidic soil. Blooms on new wood. prune in late winter. Spreads readily by root suckers; allow to naturalize or manage by removing suckers. No serious pests or diseases. Tolerates clay and flooding. Highly adaptable once established.
Pairs well with these.
Same light, same soil, same wildlife. Janet's picks to plant alongside summersweet.
Or skip the guesswork.
Curated packages bundle complementary species for an instant habitat. One reservation, one pickup day, a printed layout map.
Short on Space Package
For gardeners who have an abundance of passion but are short on space, this package features tidy, upright, clump-forming natives that behave and function well in small spaces.
Shade Bed Package
Ferns, sedges, and woodland natives that thrive under existing trees.
Birder’s Paradise Package
For the avid bird watchers and budding ornithologists in our community, the Birder’s Paradise Package consists of species that Hill House Nursery staff and longtime native plant advocates such as Doug Tallamy consider ‘premier bird garden plants’.