About this variety
By day it is a pleasant enough plant and no more: branching stems at 75 to 90cm carrying loose clusters of four-petalled flowers that look like a slightly rough phlox, here in a blend of violet-purple and white. Then the sun goes down.
The scent is the whole reason to grow it. As the temperature drops the flowers release a heavy sweet fragrance of violets and cloves that carries right across a garden, timed that way to bring in night-flying moths. Plant it by a bench, a path you use in the evening, or an open kitchen window.
It is a biennial: rosette the first year, flowers in May and June the second, then it dies. It self-seeds prolifically, which is how a colony keeps going and also how it turns up in places you did not intend, so pull what you do not want while it is small. Two other things worth knowing. It is the preferred larval food plant of the orange tip butterfly, so leave some seed pods rather than cutting everything back, and the foliage mildews badly in a dry late summer.
