I've grown it for years.

It's annual where i live. (Zone 5)

Both Sylvestris and alata are fragrant.

Seeds are easy to find (I like Select Seeds...they also have plants)

It's also an annual for me. I've had it for the last two seasons but not this past (just due to time getting away from me). Even though we are on the boundary of zones 6 and 5, because our season starts so very late (forsythia don't bloom until mid-May or later), and also I believe because our summers are cool, it takes a while for the flowers to develop. Still, it's easy and nice. I planted it for hummingbirds.

"I planted it for hummingbirds."

Ditto :-) And for the fragrance, which is delightful on a warm evening. N. sylvestris will often winter over for me as will N. langsdorffii. And both grow and flower reasonably well in my rather shady garden

I'll be trying some of these old seeds next year.

Inside the packet:

Nicotiana is fairly common in the Puget Sound area (WA state). I'm not sure if it grows as a perennial or an annual.

It smells like vanilla tobacco, with far less of the smoky aspect.

Smell is not extremely strong, you'll often need to poke your nose into the flower to smell it, but I think it really depends on the exact variety. You need a lot of flowers to be able to smell it wafting in the air from 4 feet away.

LOL! You make them sound as though they spring up all by themselves :-) They are a tender perennial that is easily grown from seed just about anywhere and are also sold as small starts at most nursereries/greenhouses. In milder areas of Puget Sound they winter over relatively easily and will often self seed......much like snapdragons do. And I find the fragrance of N. sylvestris quite intense in the evening and carries very easily over a distance of several yards. The scent of N. alata is not nearly as strong. N. langsdorffii has no scent.

Swallowtail has seeds, I’ve had good luck with them. They will re seed even here where it’s cold.

Something like 20 years ago I bought a 6 pack of small mixed color hybrid Nicotiana. I haven’t been without a mix of late summer pink, red and white Nicotiana since then. They are happy self-seeders for me, easy to remove where I don’t want them and I always leave some bare soil where they might be seeding. Mine are strongly scented and typically bloom during the day as well as at night, but they only have the beautiful, wafting, similar-to-vanilla scent from late afternoon to early morning. At this time of year I often have a fan in an upstairs window blowing out hot air in the evening, and a side benefit is that along with cool air entering all the other windows comes the scent of Nicotiana. That $3.50 was hands down the most bang for the buck that I ever spent on my garden, but at the time it was just easy annual color to fill in while we did house repairs and reconstruction and I knew nothing about them. I likely would have flowers earlier if I started seed indoors.

NH Babs, that is encouraging. I grew it in my pollinator bed, an older bed that came with the house, but have since realized the soil is much worse that I had thought. What I had hoped would be a nearly effort-free bed (that had to be redesigned because it now gets too much sun for most of the existing plants) will be a major soil re-do project. I am very glad to hear Nicotiana could self-seed given decent soil!