Winter Jasmine,
Jasminum nudiflorum is a flowering hero of the winter landscape. The long period of soft yellow blooms begin to appear from late December all the way through March. Though not a show stopper like Forsythia that blooms all at once, it can be an unexpected surprise to stumble upon its cheerful flowers during a drab time of year. The succession of blooms acts like a countdown, that reminds you of what Spring will soon herald.
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| Jasmine in full flower - Flickr.com, Conuropsis |
During the growing season, Winter Jasmine plays a ground covering role with long arching stems covered in pinnate or feather like dark green leaves. It is deciduous in the fall, losing its leaves, but the dark green stems provide the illusion of cover from a distance. In fact, '
nudiflorum' means naked flowers that appear before the foliage emerges. Maroon-red flower buds open to solitary, six petaled flowers that are bright yellow, softening in color with age.
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| Flickr.com, Katrin Hagel |
Winter Jasmine was just one of many plants collected and brought back from China by the famed explorer, Robert Fortune in 1843. Like all explorers of the time, they collected stories as well as plants. Fortune had his fair share of stories, avoiding pirates and mobs but also disguising himself as a Mandarin merchant. Shaving his head to leave a ponytail and dressing in regional clothing permitted him to travel into parts of China that were forbidden. Fortunes biggest accomplishment from his trips to China was the successful smuggling of tea from China into the Darjeeling region of India, an action forbidden at the time. Though many of his 20,000 plants and seedlings perished on the first attempt, some plants grew and his actions ended the Chinese dominance on tea production.
One of the easiest plants to cultivate, Winter Jasmine isn't fussy where it grows. Happy in full sun to part shade, it will spread out and wonder, rooting readily whenever its stems touch moist ground. Pruning should be done in spring immediately after flowering to prevent bare patches from appearing. Old, established plants welcome heavy cutting back by removing one third of the oldest growth to the ground to rejuvenate its vigor. Plants left unpruned tend to become woody and congested with dead stems. Winter Jasmine can be trained vertically on fences or walls using support wires to fan the stems, or traditionally allowed to trail across the ground. The best applications I've seen is spilling down steep slopes or cascading over high retaining walls, softening the harshness of the materials.
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| Cascading over a wall - Flickr.com, Hardy Tropical |
Though not a plant for tight spaces, Winter Jasmine packs the most punch when allowed to gain some spread. I love its defiant spirit of flowering during the winter when most plants go dormant. On a dull day it sprinkles the landscape with splashes of sunlight, that provides hope that the gardening season is not long away!
