Mystery flower
The lad was over at a friend’s house today and, when he came home, he brought these little flowers with him. His friend’s mom thought I’d like them, but she didn’t know what they were. They were just the littlest bit wilted by the time I got them, so the photos don’t show the flowers to their best advantage, but I wonder if anyone can still make out what they are. They are the most incredibly fragrant little flowers. Just this tiny sprig has powerfully scented an entire room with a sweet and spicy fragrance. I don’t know what the rest of this plant looked like and the lad wasn’t paying attention—whether it came from a shrub or a garden plant. Anyone else recognize this flower and leaf? The flowers and leaves are attached to a woody stem. Whatever it is, I really want to plant some! The fragrance is out of this world!
I definitely know they’re not impatiens (you spelled it correctly), cuz I grow those almost every year. These are tiny flowers. About the same size as a button on your shirt.
I hunted around Google for small fragrant garden flowers and found some that look very much like the ones I have, called Heliotrope. Then I searched Flickr and came up with a Heliotrope page. Looks a lot like what I have. Heliotrope comes in shades from white to pink to lavender to purple. All the references say they don’t bloom until early to mid-summer. This seems a little early, but since our trees leafed out almost three weeks early, maybe plants think this is early summer. Dunno. If these are heliotrope, I want a garden full of them.
If that’s what they are, it’s got an amusing side story for me: my father could never remember flowers’ names, so “heliotrope” became the catch word for all not-easily-identified flowers.
Well see, there you go. This, then, is the perfect heliotrope. 
At first I was thinking ground phlox, but I do not remember them being particularly fragrant..........but take a look at thesep--they are heliotrope, but an old fashioned one??
http://www.selectseeds.com/cgi-bin/htmlos.cgi/0852.9.7761404615546257866?
Posted by cyn on 05/08/06 at 10:19 AM
I get the impression that the deep dark purple ones are the old fashioned variety and the different colors are the newer ones. There seem to be a lot of different kinds of heliotrope out there. Enough to make my head spin.
One place I lived had a field of wild phlox just up the road. I used to get in there with my shears and cut huge bunches for the house. They had a lovely sweet scent. I thought phlox would make a nice addition to the garden, but discovered that the ones sold at the nursery had little to no scent at all. Very disappointing. I’ve noticed the same thing with a couple other flowers where the old varieties were strongly scented and the new hybrids have none. One of my favorites, nicotiana (tobacco plant) used to have a strong spicy scent that would pour into the house on a gentle breeze at night. Now I have to scour the earth to find one of the older scented varieties. The ones I now find at the nurseries or even in seed packets have no scent at all. Why???
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There’s the next thing for Google Labs to work on: side-by-side comparisons of images to find matches.
If they were pinker I’d say impatiens (which is probably spelt wrong, but whatever), but as it is I’m clueless.