Henry's Garnet Sweetspire

Fragrant summer blooms for native bees and deep garnet fall color in the widest range of conditions of any native shrub.

Henry's Garnet is the sweetspire cultivar that put native sweetspire on the map as a garden plant. The fragrant white flower racemes in June and July are longer and more dramatic than on the straight species: arching bottlebrushes of white, sweet-scented blooms that hang from every stem and draw native bees in numbers you can hear. It grows three to five feet tall and spreads wider, forming a graceful mounding presence with distinctly arching branches. The fall color is the reason for the name: deep garnet-red to burgundy-purple that starts in October and holds well into November, outlasting most other shrubs. In sun it's deeper and longer-lasting; in shade it's still reliably good. It tolerates wet soil, clay, full shade, and drought with equal ease. Named for Mary Henry, a Philadelphia-area botanist who collected plants from the wild in the mid-20th century.