Grandma Blooms Are Back in Fashion & They’re Sparking Happy Childhood Memories: Add These Scented Plants to Your Garden For Feel-Good Moments of Nostalgic Joy

Think back to a warm summer’s day in your grandparents’ garden… the sun’s shining, the grass has just been mown, and perhaps you’re searching for ladybugs or helping to snap the ends off a pile of homegrown green beans. How do you feel? If your answer is a little warm and fuzzy, then this gorgeous garden nostalgia trend is just what you need right now.

Nostalgic planting is all about using scented plants that evoke heartwarming memories of a happy, carefree time to create a comforting space in your backyard. Garden scents such as lilac, lavender, sweet peas and tea roses can bring past emotions associated with these popular blooms into the present day, creating a safe sanctuary that's a welcome escape from all the pressures of our hectic lives. And it's a huge garden trend right now – and frankly, it’s no wonder these nostalgic flowers are making such a comeback. We could all do with more peaceful, feel-good moments right now, and bringing evocative backyard scent to your life is an easy way to get them.

These charming plants have stood the test of time for good reason: they’re all floriferous, intensely-scented, hard-working backyard staples. But plant breeders have been very busy since our grandparents grew these beauties in their gardens, creating new cultivars with more flowers, more scent, and more disease resistance. So while these grandma blooms might look charmingly old-fashioned, they perform brilliantly well in a modern garden.

The one element all these nostalgic plants have in common is that they’re highly fragranced, and that’s no coincidence. Our sense of smell is closely linked with the part of our brain that processes memories, which is why scents can trigger such powerful memories. So, as well as evoking pleasant memories, all these easy-to-grow plants will fragrance your backyard, too.

Take your pick from these top varieties, and look forward to feel-good moments of nostalgic joy.

1. Lavender

The scent of lavender is floral and herby with fresh, woody undertones, and contains compounds that help to reduce anxiety, promote relaxation and aid good sleep. It’s very easy to grow, bringing not only months of flowers but attracting bees and butterflies, and it even repels mosquitoes.

Lavender hails from a Mediterranean climate so it likes warmth and fast drainage. Plant it once the soil has warmed up, in a sunny spot. For a robust plant that's strongly fragranced, look for lavenders with ‘Lavandula x intermedia’ as part of their name. These are Lavandin, a hybrid of hardy English Lavandula angustifolia and another European species, L. latifolia, that contains up to ten times as much essential oil for wonderful scent.

2. Lilac

The scent of lilac is intoxicating, a sweet but soft floral aroma that often has nutty undertones, and is beloved by bees and butterflies. The fragrance is known to carry in warm air, so a single plant can fill your yard with scent – and don’t be surprised when your neighbors want to know what that fabulous perfume is!

Lilac is super-easy to grow in a sunny spot and the more sun it gets, the more powerful the scent will be. While these deciduous shrubs used to be pretty big with a tendency for leggy stems, modern cultivars have been bred to be far more compact and well behaved, without losing any of their incredible flower power.

Plant as soon as the soil can be worked and, as lilac flowers on old wood, prune straight after blooming for maximum scent.

3. Tea Roses

Hybrid tea roses were created when beautiful but delicate tea roses, hailing from China, were crossed with hardier roses in the mid-19th century. They became the archetypal rose with exquisitely pointed buds, opulent petals and an intense fragrance.

These days, there are thousands of varieties. They’re known for repeat-flowering all through summer, typically producing one bloom per stem. This means the flowers can reach sizes of six inches across, sometimes with as many as 50 petals, and are great for cutting.

Choose a sunny, sheltered spot to grow your hybrid tea rose, and mix plenty of well-rotted organic matter such as compost or manure into the soil, along with a slow-release rose feed such as this plant food from Amazon. Tea roses prefer well-drained ground so if your soil is heavy, mix plenty of coarse grit in too. And get ready to swoon!

4. Sweet Peas

So wonderful is the floral fragrance of sweet peas that the scent has been synthetically replicated to feature in many popular perfumes such as Jo Malone’s English Pear & Sweet Pea Cologne and Jimmy Choo’s Blossom. If this delightful scent is your reason to grow, be sure to choose an annual sweet pea (Lathyrus odoratus) rather than the perennial sweet pea (most commonly Lathyrus latifolius) which is far less fragrant.

Lathyrus odoratus is so easy to grow from seed and early spring is the exact right time to start: sow indoors or outdoors around 6 weeks before your last frost date. Give them a trellis for support, pinch out the tips when the plants are 4 inches high to force more stems so more flowers, and once they start budding, fuel lots of blooms with a tomato feed such as Espoma, available from Amazon.

An annual sweet pea’s sole aim is to set seed so as long as you keep cutting the flowers off, the vine will keep producing more blooms, right up until October. These make excellent cut flowers, with a posy scenting a whole room, and the more you snip, the more will grow!

Modern cultivars have generally kept the scent of old-fashioned sweet peas but improved their growth: Modern Grandifloras maximise fragrance and also have larger flowers with longer stems which make them better for a vase; Spencer types are known for their big frilly blooms and often grow three or four flowers on a single stem.