Summersweet

Clethra alnifolia

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.