Evening Romance

Enhance your garden with nocturnally scented flowers.

- VICTOR LAZZARI

When my work relocated me from Maryland to South Florida in 2007, it was a total upheaval to gardening as I knew it. Instead of the temperate USDA Zone 6b/7a that was so comfortable and familiar to me, I was rather abruptly thrust into Zones 10b/11a, in a part of the country that vacillates between tropical savannah and tropical rainforest.

The move required me to unlearn about 90 percent of the horticulture I knew. I could still have petunias, for example, but I had to plant them in December instead of May. (To this day I remember my first time seeing petunias next to boxed Christmas ornaments in a Miami-based Home Depot, a truly jarring combination.) But many of my cold-climate staples, like bearded irises, lilacs and rhubarb, were now off the menu entirely-quite literally in the case of the rhubarb. I won't deny that I still daydream of wandering into a rhubarb patch on a cool spring morning to harvest for the first pie of the season.

Gradually, silver linings popped up in the form of tropical garden specialties that helped me get over my lilac losses and rhubarb regrets. While things like heliconias and orchids became fun new gardening pleasures, I quickly gravitated toward one group in particular: nocturnally fragrant flowers.

Strategically scented

Tropical America, which has been my home for almost 20 years now, is wonderfully rife with flowers that are scented primarily when the sun goes down, something I rarely experienced in my Maryland gardens. The "why" of this phenomenon relates to that important b-word: biodiversity.