Flower of the Week: Sweet Alyssum
Waves of sweet scent ride the breezes of late spring and early summer, luring you to seek the origin of such delightful fragrance. It comes from clusters of dense, lovely, lush, sweet alyssums, blossoming quietly in small bundles in flower beds and corners. These flowers smell like sweet melting honey. Feel an urge to own these exquisite floral fairies? Grow them at home and add a sense of lively energy to your life and garden.
Common sweet alyssum flowers are white or light purple. Because people are so fond of its sweet fragrance, horticulturists have cultivated many other colorful varieties, boasting pink, rosy red, purple, and apricot blossoms. They also come with delightful names such as Wonder Land, Snow Crystals, Carpet of Snow, Oriental Nights, Violet Queen, etc.
Nowadays, your choice is no longer bound to white. There’s a wide range of color selections.
Originating from Macaronesia, sweet alyssum blooms most charmingly in the Mediterranean climate. To appreciate its beauty in its most primitive form, consider paying a visit to the Canary Islands.
Located off the West Coast of Africa, the Canary Islands are a short distance from mysterious Morocco across the sea. This is not only home to Sanmao and Jose Maria Quero y Ruiz’s romantic love story, but is a beautiful showcase of vivid biodiversity. Just walk up the hills along any random trail, and you will be greeted by roadside sweet alyssums blossoming tenaciously in boulder cracks.
April to June is the best time to look for sweet alyssum here. Unlike the artificial beauty carefully staged in a man-made city landscape, here you can capture unrestricted wild charisma from the clusters of spherical inflorescences. Tenacious and unapologetic, sweet alyssum blossoms in the rock cracks with intense vitality–some taller, some shorter–displaying an unpolished raw liveliness of dynamic energy.
Richard Brautigan, an American poet of the Beat Generation, published a collection of poems in 1968 called Please Plant This Book. Humorous and light-hearted, the poems are all written around plants and vegetables, including sweet alyssum.
The poem collection was recently reprinted with a full-scale makeover and redesign. The poems are now printed on different envelopes with respective plant seeds hidden inside. When you read the poem about sweet alyssum, you can sow the attached seeds. The title of the collection has been turned into reality.
The flower language of sweet alyssum suggests innocence, ease of mind, and sweet memories. Filmmakers have imbedded those wonderful little floral balls in their storytelling as early as the silent film era.
In 1915, American filmmaker Colin Campbell directed a silent drama picture called Sweet Alyssum. The film tells a complex story of entangled love and hate in which the leading girl’s name is also Sweet Alyssum.
Sweet Alyssum is a very robust plant. Wild species survive in rock cracks. With a reasonable supply of light and water, the plant can grow without much care.
Sweet Alyssum likes ample sunlight, but needs proper shading in hot summers. Drought-resistant, it doesn’t require water often, and an extended run of wet weather can make it more vulnerable to pests and disease. It grows best in well-drained soil. To achieve a more beautiful look, the terminal young buds of sweet alyssum can be pinched to make the plant grow more compactly and bloom more densely. Deadheading spent flowers helps reduce nutrition loss and make it bloom again.
Size: 10-50 cm (4-20 in) tall
Hardiness: USDA Hardiness Zones 5-9
Light: Full sun to half sun
Soil: Well-drained
Blooming time: Spring or summer