Growing next best thing to chocolate

Alas, chocolate, native to steamy equatorial lowlands, is not usually productive when grown as a houseplant. Even if you could get the football-sized pods dangling from the trunk of a chocolate tree, fairly intricate processing is needed before you’d have something worth sinking your teeth into.

But there are some chocolatey alternatives:

• ALMOST CHOCOLATE: A number of plants — Chocolate Ruffles coral bells, Chocolate Cake gladiola and Sweet Chocolate pepper, for example — have chocolatey looking leaves or fruits. Let’s shy away from them, though, because their chocolate is only skin deep.

Plants with chocolatey aromas offer instant gratification more akin to Hershey’s Kisses. For an affair on shaky ground and needing a quick horticultural chocolate fix, I suggest a peppermint geranium plant. Peppermint geranium makes a nice houseplant for a sunny windowsill, and, in spring, feathery white blossoms add to the sensual pleasure. OK, it’s not chocolate, but there is that common association of peppermint and chocolate.

The Chocolate Mint variety of peppermint is another plant that shares its aroma as soon as it is in hand. I’m not sure there’s really any chocolate in that pepperminty aroma; perhaps it’s the chocolatey hue of the leaves and the power of suggestion. Chocolate Mint, like other mints, is easy to grow and multiply. Mints do become scraggly indoors, so plan on eventually planting chocolate mint outdoors in a sunny garden bed.

Wax plant (Hoya carnosa) is an easy-to-grow houseplant with a genuine, sweet, chocolatey aroma, though it might require some patience. The aroma comes from the flowers, which are not borne continuously. The pure chocolate aroma is worth waiting for.

• ANNUAL AND PERENNIAL CHOCOLATES: Other plants could cement a romance with the smell of chocolate in the months and years ahead. Despite its name, summer snowflake offers up its fragrance — admittedly slight and, to some noses, just sweet rather than chocolatey — in spring.

Summer brings chocolatey scents from two annual flowers: chocolate cosmos and birds’ eyes. This cosmos has dark, almost black blossoms. Chocolate cosmos grows from a fat tuber, which you lift in the fall and replant each spring, just as you do dahlias. Birds’ eyes (Gilia tricolor) was once a popular half-hardy annual, loved for its profusion of creamy white flowers, which have dark brown throats and petals edged in purple blush. The chocolate scent is there, but slight.

Chocolate daisy (Berlandiera lyrata) is a perennial flower that is strong in scent and tough in disposition. And the plant’s also pretty, displaying characteristic daisy heads of yellow petals around green eyes for weeks and weeks through summer.