Mysterious and sweet - where’s the Sarcoccoca?

“What's that scent?, where's it coming from?”.  This sensation is not what you expect on a cold winter's day, and not from a flower.  There are a few very early flowering shrubs that can play this trick on you, casting fragrant molecules to the breeze of such potency that they can be detected tens of metres from the source.  In many cases, the source turns out to be a Sarcoccoca.

These are known by some as Sweet Box, which just about says it all, as it looks a bit like a box, is botanically related, but unlike box box has very early flowers with a most captivating and carrying fragrance.  There are several, very similar species in cultivation and they are all much of a muchness: darkly evergreen, upright growth, to not much more than a metre, with small and not terribly significant-looking little white flowers, but who needs to make a visual splash when you can be smelt from so far away?

As you might imagine from the leaves, this is a plant of the woodland floor, southern Chinese and East Asian woodland floors in particular.  So, it is good for shade, and given how the scent carries, is the most perfect courtyard plant, including those awkward spaces around the house, which don't get much sun, but also where the surprise and the joy of encountering the fragrance is both most likely and appreciated.

These are easy to grow little shrubs, but can be slow to establish; once under way thought, they begin to gently run, sending up new stems to form slowly-expanding clumps.  And in case you were wondering, being related to box, they do not suffer from the plague of pests and diseases that box does.  But sorry, it's not suitable for clipping.