The next time you go to the nursery or garden center, lead with your nose. Get up close to the plants that catch your eye and take home the ones with the best fragrance. Your garden, whether it is an estate property upholstered in expensive floral treasures or a collection of annuals in recycled spackle buckets, will be the better for it.
Chances are, if your garden center has a display of young annuals, one of the varieties that will tantalize your sense of smell will be stock—Matthiola to its botanist friends. Most stock displayed on the plant pallets will be double varieties, upright and frilly, with the individual blossoms arranged in terminal racemes or elongated flower clusters at the tops of the stalks. Each white, pink, purple, brownish or yellow flower is attached to a very short pedicel or stalk, which is in turn attached to the main stem. The oldest flowers are at the bottom of the raceme and open first, followed in sequence by the higher altitude blooms further up the stem. This bloom sequence is also characteristic of flowers like snapdragons and foxglove. Double stocks hide all of this detail handily, and each stalk registers to the casual eye as a frilly mass.
Like many of us, stock has some pretty smelly relations. Matthiola is part of the large Crucifereae family, which is also home to the ultra fashionable kale, plus good-for-you veggies like broccoli and cauliflower. These cruciferous plants share four-petaled flowers, though this resemblance is only apparent on single-flowered varieties of stock. I have never cooked stock’s stalks or leaves. Who knows? They might share the nose-wrinkling scent of their vegetable cousins.
Stock also has some sweeter smelling relatives. Among them is dame’s rocket—Hesperis matronalis—with similarly configured flowers, a slightly sweet scent and wayward habits. Both stock and dame’s rocket are Old World natives, but dame’s rocket escaped cultivation long ago and now populates right-of-ways, hedgerows and untended spaces just about everywhere. Another old-fashioned favorite, wallflower—Erysimum—is another member of the Crucifereae family. It is not readily available these days, unless you are willing to grow it from seed, but eventually the wheel of fashion will surely spin back around and you will find it alongside stock, growing by the hundreds in garden center cell packs.
Stock can rise anywhere from one to three feet, depending on variety and growing conditions. Like most flowering annuals, they are sun worshippers. Planted from seed in very early spring, annual varieties will most often flower in early summer. Biennial stock seeds should be planted in mid to late summer for flowering the following growing season. Both types sometimes go by the botanical name Matthiola incana, but are generally complex hybrids descended from several different Matthiola species. Check seed packet labels to determine whether you are buying annual or biennial types.
A separate species, night-scented stock–Matthiola bicornis or Matthiola longipetala–is especially fragrant in the evening, an open invitation to its moth pollinators. It is perfect for moonlight gardens.
Stock, in its simple, single-flowered form, came here from Europe with early settlers. A highly fragrant variety, found in Brompton Park, London, in the eighteenth century, was dubbed “Brompton Stock,” and the nickname has stuck, on both sides of the pond, until the present day. The Brompton name is traditionally associated with the biennial, fall-blooming stocks, rather than their annual relations. Denise Adams, in her wonderful book, Restoring American Gardens, notes that stock breeding took a great leap forward during the nineteenth century. In 1836, one year before the young Queen Victoria ascended England’s throne, American retailers offered only white and purple stock varieties. By the mid-eighteen sixties, just after the death of Victoria’s beloved, Albert, a single Massachusetts nursery offered 31 different varieties. Clearly, our Victorian gardening forbears were spoiled for choice.
Stock, especially the shorter varieties, is a natural for container culture. The fragrance enhances the charms of lovely but unscented annual or perennial planting companions. In the garden, position the plants near paths or gathering areas, so visitors can appreciate both the flowers and the butterflies they attract.
If you want to run out and get stock, head to just about any large nursery or garden center. My local ones offer mixed cell packs of single and double-flowered varieties. It is not too late to start the plants from seed either. Troll the local seed racks or contact Burpee Seeds, W. Atlee Burpee & Co., 300 Park Avenue,Warminster, PA 18974, (800) 888-1447, www.burpee.com. Free catalog.