How to grow sweet alyssums

Sweet alyssum is a low, spreading annual grown for dense mounds of small, four-petaled flowers and a honey-like fragrance. Plants stay low, generally 3 to 10 inches tall and spreading to about a foot, so gardeners tuck it along bed edges and between stepping stones, or at the front of taller vegetables and flowers, filling gaps quickly from seed. It blooms through cool weather and draws bees and other pollinators, which is part of why gardeners plant it among food crops rather than off in a separate flower bed.

The hardest part of growing sweet alyssum well is keeping it blooming once summer heat arrives. North Carolina State Extension notes that bloom declines in hot summers, and a gardener who leaves the spent planting in place hoping it recovers on its own is usually disappointed. Cutting the plant back hard when flowering slows is what extension guidance recommends, but a second-year gardener who has learned to leave flowering annuals alone often skips this step. Left uncut, the planting turns into a tangle of bare, leggy stems with a scattering of blooms, and by the time the problem is obvious, cutting back barely helps before fall.