5 Plants That Will Make Your Garden Smell

Plants don’t always give off beautiful floral aromas, scents, and smells. There are plants that give off unpleasant smells that could stink up your garden. Most plants give off produce scents to lure in pollinators and repel predators.

Bees and butterflies are drawn to your garden by sweet scents from fragrant flowers. Plants with foul odors smell this way to attract flies and beetles which normally lay their eggs in feces and rotting materials.

With the gardening season around the corner, you may want to consider avoiding putting these plants in your garden.

Here are five plants that can smell up your garden.

• Crown Imperial Plants

  Share

  The flowers have a potent, musky scent almost like a skunk, which deters rodents and voles as well as squirrels and deer from the garden. Crown imperial plants are native to Asia and the Middle East. They come in These flowers come in shades of red, orange, and yellow.

• Stinking Corpse Lily

  Share

  The flower has a large central opening surrounded by petal-like structures and can grow huge, weighing up to 24 pounds. Also known as the rafflesia arnoldii, which smells and even looks like a rotting carcass.

• Carrion Flower

  Share

  These flowers are often pollinated by flies and other insects that are attracted to the smell of decay. The most common odors describe it as smelling like a rotting animal, a dead mouse, foul, and sulfur-like during flowering.
• Skunk Cabbage

  Share

  Skunk Cabbages get their name from the fact they produce a smell of rotting meat or skunk when their leaves are bruised or crushed. While the smell may be unpleasant, the odor can help keep pests away and attract beneficial pollinators including bees and butterflies.

• Corpse Flower

  Share

  This flower is far from sweet. The United States Botanic Garden says its the worst-smelling flower in the world. Also known as the titan arum, some people compare its smell to a stinking corpse or rotting flesh.