The Pepperbush Summersweet is a wonderful native plant that is clean and nice to touch. It is sort of upright bushy in landscapes growing about 6 to 8 feet high. In nature it can get much bigger to over 15 feet high. The white pyramidal clusters of flowers are very fragrant and bloom in July and August about 4 weeks long. It has handsome foliage that turns a good yellow to orange in autumn. Its native range is from southern Maine down to northern Florida right along the coastal plain and then to east Texas along the Gulf plain. It loves draining wet acid, sandy soil in nature and is found in bogs, swamps, along watercourses and ponds, and bottomlands. However, it grows well in silty-clay loam soils that are slightly alkaline in the Midwest in landscapes. I've seen it growing wild in southern New Jersey and Delaware a lot. This species is available at lots of nurseries and garden centers either as the larger mother species with white flowers or as a few dwarf or pink-flowering cultivars.

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Honey bees get nectar from this plant which produces a white honey.

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The book, "How to Know the Wildflowers" (1922) by Mrs William Starr Dana also gives the common name of White Alder to this plant. The author says the genus name of Clethra is the ancient Greek name for alder, which this plant somewhat resembles in foliage. The author also speaks poetically of the fragrance of this plant and appreciates that it blooms in August when many flowers are showing "the effects of the long days of heat and drought." She also notes that it grows in "the cool thickets which line the lanes along the New England coast."

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