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Large pink beefsteak fruits with good flavor and texture. In a good year, this variety can be exceptionally delicious. One of the best to use for toasted cheese sandwiches!

One of my favorite plants for its amazing spring fragrance. It can be a bit invasive at times, but never unpleasantly so. Nothing is more welcome than its sweet fragrance when in bloom!

A stalwart cultivar that never seems to suffer any disease problems and never fails to broadcast its heady perfume across the garden each year in season. This is a significant improvement over most old-fashioned garden phlox.

Another lovely native grass. It tends to do best with slightly less than full sun and ample moisture. Once mature, it is very showy and the bloom heads have an unusual popcorn-like scent that can be very pleasant.

One of my favorite ornamental grasses with glaucous blue-tinged, gracefully arching foliage and very showy flower heads in late summer and fall. This one really appreciates good drainage for best growth and winter survival. Where happy (and it is not hard to please), it is stunningly beautiful!

A truly amazing shrub. While not the most attractive growth habit, it offers the winter/early spring garden several weeks of intense, delicious, wafting, pervasive, sweet, addictive perfume. In a good year, flowers will last 6-8 weeks and are impervious to rain, snow, frost, ice, hail and wind. In spite of the often rangy growth habit, try to prune as little as possible so you will not sacrifice any of next year's glorious blooms.

A reliable steady performer with showy, fragrant flowers. This is one of those special garden perennials that, while not flashy or exciting, always seems to be "just right."

A wonderful species with large scapes of huge, fragrant nocturnal flowers. This plant is very difficult to find and has petioled foliage much like that of the Amazon lily (Eucharis sp.) only much more robust. This plant likes a lot of warmth, dappled sunlight, and plenty of water and fertilizer to bloom well.

While this plant is indeed commonly cultivated in México, it is never called "azahar" (which is the word used for citrus blossoms, especially orange blossoms), but rather "nardo" or "azucena" (azucena being the generic term for any white, lily-like flower). The tuberose was already entirely domesticated by the indigenous civilizations of Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest, and forms of Polianthes tuberosa growing in the wild have never been discovered or seen.

There is a lot of misinformation circulating about this plant, so be wary of your sources. Basically, it needs warmth, sunshine, well-drained soil, even moisture (don't overwater but don't let it get bone dry either!), and at least a month and a half of good growing AFTER it is done flowering if you want the tubers to produce flowers the next growing season. That is where most northern growers fail with them, since they tend to bloom rather late in the season anyway. In any case and no matter what the climate, they are enchanting when grown in LARGE pots (perhaps three roots to a 10" or 12" pot) that provide ample room for the vigorous root systems and allow for sufficient expansion of the tubers. Since plants grown in pots tend to be warmer than those grown in the ground, they often bloom a few weeks earlier as well. When grown correctly, the tubers multiply at an astonishingly fast rate and you will have an ample supply to provide blooms from year to year. Oh!, and they must be divided AT LEAST every three or four years, otherwise the blooms will fizzle out.

I prefer the single "Mexican" tuberoses over the double ones called "The Pearl." The doubles can't hold a candle to the singles for elegance, intensity of fragrance or ease of cultivation (in my experience, the doubles tend to be a bit fussy).

I am really enjoying my 'Stupice' this year. Sometimes it is better to forget about all of the unusual heirloom tomato distractions out there and just focus on the basics.

For me, 'Stupice' sets heavily in cold weather, in hot weather (several weeks in mid-90s), in extreme wind and in partial shade. It is always the first non-cherry to ripen and will continue to ripen fruit steadily until the very end of the season when other plants will already have petered out. My plants have never been bothered by pests or disease, and they have a very attractive and manageable compact indeterminate growth habit.

Considering the abundant fruit set, earliness and size of the tomatoes, 'Stupice' has a wonderful flavor. It is mainly sweet with a slight, nice tang underneath. It is good fresh and good sliced up in salads, but it really truly shines when it is cooked. 'Stupice' made into sauces or baked into tarts will make you curl your toes in delight as you eat it. 'Stupice' soup with freshly baked, homemade bread is one of life's great little-known pleasures. And 'Stupice' juice is wonderfully delicious. Oh, and it is productive enough to be a smallish but excellent canner.

Just a summary:

Flavor fresh: 6-6.5/10
Flavor cooked: 8.5/10, one of the best

This might possibly be the best begonia houseplant available. It is vigorous, healthy, problem-free and tolerant of any hardship or neglect you can think of. But if you treat it well--bright, indirect light; fluffy and airy soil with steady moisture; a mild dose of balanced fertilizer with trace elements once in a while; and occasional repotting--it will grow into the largest, lushest and most beautiful of specimens. It will be the plant that visitors to your home will comment on and ask about. People will beg for a start. Guests, even those who "know about plants," will overlook all the other exotic rarities in your home and make a bee-line to check out your beefsteak begonia. This is truly an amiable, heirloom quality hybrid.

For many years I grew this happily as a houseplant in a south-facing window. It was a rapid multiplier and demanded frequent division, repotting and heavy fertilization and watering, but was otherwise problem free. Once or twice a year it would produce its magnificent scapes of giant blooms that would scent the air at night with the fragrance of vanilla and chocolate.

So fragrant, so easy to grow, so attractive... Is there really a better hosta to grow than this one? Its enormous nocturnal flowers are stunning, as is the delicious perfume that wafts out into the warm, humid late summer night air. My favorite of all hostas.

A plant with ravishingly fragrant nocturnal flowers that multiplies rapidly from cormlets around the original mother corm. It is a winter-growing species from South Africa. I start the corms in late fall and grow them on my windowsill where they flower in late winter and then go dormant by summer.

One of the absolute best and hardiest garden perennials. The nocturnal, sweetly fragrant flowers open in early evening and close around 11 am or noon the next day. The plant habit is extremely attractive and the scapes are numerous with an excellent bud count. This is a great daylily for people looking for an addition to a mixed perennial bed!

One of my favorite roses, it is rare to not be able to find an open bloom somewhere on the plant during the early summer-late fall season. With a strong yet delicate perfume, it is often a spindly grower during its first few years in a cold climate garden. After establishing a good root system, it will gradually build up into a large, graceful shrub with superb health and extraordinary blooming power.

Hoya obscura is one of my all-time favorite houseplants. It has beautiful foliage and a seemingly never-ending supply of flowers, and the scent is rich, sweet, pervasive and altogether lovely, especially at night. It is easy to grow and relatively restrained in growth (compared to certain other members of the Hoya genus) and I would never again want to be without it!

H. obscura asks only for ample moisture in an extremely well-drained potting mix, warm temperatures, and protection from direct sunlight during the hottest part of the day (morning and late afternoon sun are fine, however). This species propagates readily from stem cuttings, whether in water, in soil or in a sterile medium (such as perlite). I have no idea why it is not more widely known...

A fabulously easy houseplant for those of us in colder zones. Never fails to produce a fountain of iris-like blooms in late winter/early spring. Although each bloom only lasts a day, each cluster will produce a succession of buds for many weeks. The flowers have a light but glorious scent of peonies that wafts for a few feet in sunlight. Be aware that this plant is somewhat sensitive to fluoride and other salts in water, causing brown leaf tips. This does not harm the plant but can sometimes look unsightly. If this bothers you, then be sure to water with distilled water.

There was never an easier or more ingratiating houseplant than this. It grows much like a common spider plant (Chlorophytum), forming thick stolons that hang from the sides of pots and soon produce stolons of their own. If grown in natural light, it seldom fails to produce many showy spikes of nocturnal flowers that flood the air with the pervasive scent of hyacinths.

This plant has been a pure joy to have around. I obtained a couple of semi-dormant cuttings from a very kind and generous gardener in California in December 2009, and they rooted easily in a glass of water during the cold darkness of a Chicago winter. The cuttings have grown easily and steadily since that time in an unshaded north window. It started to bloom this May and has been forming waves of flowers every few weeks. I love everything about this plant: its understated elegance, quiet beauty and unusual flower form. But its best feature is definitely the wonderful fragrance of the flowers. It is a pure, clean, sweet, citrusy scent a lot like Aglaia odorata but maybe stronger. It can lightly fill up a room with its fragrance or it can send heady clouds of fragrance to a distant corner of the room. Curiously, if you put your nose in a flower, it only seems delicately fragrant, but yet it is able to throw its fragrance around like a ventriloquist to surprise you when you least expect it. Each chicken-foot-shaped flower only lasts a day or two but the plant is not stingy with bloom production and always has a cluster or two waiting to open. I am not sure why this plant isn't more well known or commercially available (I can't think of a single commercial source for this plant right now), but it is a nearly perfect houseplant: attractive, uncomplaining and fragrant.