Henry's Garnet Sweetspire

Itea virginica 'Henry's Garnet'

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.