Many a gardener is confused by the variety, often of dissimilar plants, that are called jasmine or jessamine, in its more poetic form.
But there’s one thing they all have in common: a permeating sweet perfume.
Some of them, with common names like Madagascar jasmine or Chilean jasmine, a hint of far-off, exotic lands; many come from such old, romantic places as Persia, Arabia, India, and China, while others hail from little-known Peru, Chile, or the West Indies. Only one is a native American.
Their aroma has been loved and preserved through the ages. Jasmine tea is a delicacy enjoyed by many. The native girls of the East bind the jasmine blossoms in their oiled hair overnight to scent the air with its delicate perfume.
For centuries the fragrance has been extracted by steeping the blossoms in oil with direct sunlight to hasten the process.
At present, jasmine is a fragrance that can be had in bath salts and soaps, toilet water, perfumes, and powders.
The Name Is Confusing
What, then, is jasmine?
First, I shall tell of some of the more familiar plants that are called jasmine or jessamine, but they are of different families with other botanical names. Then we will cover the true jasmines.
Cestrum Nocturnum
Probably night-blooming jasmine is the one most often mistaken for true jasmine. Cestrum nocturnum is a large, untidy shrub native to the West Indies.
Its small, greenish-white flowers are rather inconspicuous, but at night they open to perfume the entire garden and waft their penetrating fragrance through open windows. Likewise, a small cluster of flowers will scent a large room.
Other Species
A similar but smaller shrub is willow-leaved jessamine, C. parqui, from Chile, the hardiest species. Finally, C. diurnum, the largest of the three, has white flowers and is known as day-jessamine because of its blooming habit.
All are tender to grow only in our mildest climates or the glasshouse.
Jasmine-like Gardenia
The cape-jasmine is Gardenia jasminoides (meaning the gardenia that is jasmine-like) from China. It is a fairly low shrub with large, rich green leaves.
Most varieties prefer some shade and bloom in winter, though one likes the sun and puts forth its big, fragrant, many-petaled flowers in the summer.
The variety Gardenia jasminoides radicans is a very low-edging shrub with small leaves and flowers. The blossoms all have thick, waxy petals, white to cream in color, that become almost yellow as they fade.
The perfume is so intense that many people object to it in the house.It is grown throughout Southern and Southern California, sometimes as a low hedge plant. It is also the florists’ flower, both North and South, grown in greenhouses for corsages.
Gelsemium Sempervirens
Carolina jessamine, yellow jasmine, false jasmine, jasimer, and wild jasmine of the Carolinas – all these names have been bestowed upon Gelsemium sempervirens.
This evergreen twining vine is the only so-called jasmine native to our country, growing wild from Virginia to Florida.
Its golden yellow trumpets usually appear in Winter, and their fragrance has given them the ninny jasmine names.
It clambers up into trees, spreads over the ground, and down banks or screens porches. So loved is it in the South that it has been named the state flower of South Carolina.
A Chilean Native
Mandevilla suaveolens is the Chilean jasmine, a deciduous vine with pointed, heart-shaped leaves and racemes of fragrant funnel-shaped white flowers that bloom in the Summer.
It was introduced into England by H. J. Mandeville, the British Minister to the Argentine, and he called the Chilean jasmine as he had been told that it came originally from Chile.
From India and Malaya conies the attractive evergreen shrub, with green pinnate leaves and panicles of fragrant white flowers followed by red fruits, that is known as orange jessamine, Murraea exotica.
Like most other plants called jasmine, it is tender and can be grown out-of-doors only in Southern Florida and Southern California. However, it is a favorite wherever it can be grown.
Madagascar jasmine tells of its native haunt. The vine is extremely tender to frost but is often cultivated under glass. Its waxen white flowers are tube-shaped and come in clusters that last many days after cutting.
Popular with debutantes, when worn in the hair, its bewitching perfume is magic. Only in the mildest of climes can the Stephanotis floribunda be grown out-of-doors.
Lesser-Known “Jasmines”
Confederate jessamine, star jasmine, Malayan jasmine, and Trachelospermum jasminoides, are all the same plant. No wonder the first three names have been bestowed upon the dainty, white, pin-wheel-like blossoms and neat evergreen leaves that form this plant.
It is reasonably hardy in mild temperate climates, and its uses are as versatile as its names. It also makes a delightfully fragrant ground cover in partial shade.
It can be grown as a vine, and it may easily be espaliered flat against a wall for narrow spaces. Or it may be staked, and the pliant side growth wound in and out to form a shrub-like mound.
Do not shy away from this lovely thing because of its terrific name if you live where it can be grown.
Several Other Jasmine-Named flowers Less Widely Known
- Rock-jasmine or androsace is a trailing alpine of silvery downy leaves and primrose-like bloom.
- Crape-jasmine, Erratamia coronaria, a large, much-branched shrub, bears intensely fragrant white flowers.
- Night-jasmine (to be distinguished from night-blooming jasmine) is Nyetanthes arbor-tristis, the tree of sadness, a shrub in colder lands, and a tree in the tropics. Its large white flowers open at night and drop the next morning.
- Philadelphus mexicanus, more often confused by being called mock orange or sweet syringa, bears the Spanish name of jasmine del-monte in its homeland. It, of course, is fragrant.
- Jasmine-box, also called mock privet, of the Phillyrea genus has fragrant flowers; it makes an excellent shrub for dry and poor soil.
- Frangipani, Plumeria rubra, known as red jasmine, flaunts its pink, red or purple flowers in its native tropical home.
The True Jasmines
All these flowers, though called jasmine, are not true jasmines. Jasminum is the genus to which the true jasmines belong.
The 100 or so kinds are native to Australia, the Canary Islands, Brazil, China, the Gold Coast, the Himalayas and other parts of India, Southern Europe and Northern Africa, North Borneo, the South Sea Islands, and Persia.
They are the poet’s jessamine of song and verse, the jasmine of tea, perfume, chaplet and necklace, romance and legend, the Persian Yasmin, and the moonlight of the grove. Jasmine may be a shrub or a vine; its blossoms are either white, yellow, or pink.
Jasminum Officinale
The most generally grown species, the true poet’s jessamine, is Jasminum officinale, a native of Persia.
It is a lax climber, with delicate leaves divided into five to nine dainty leaflets; its blossoms, five-petaled white stars, pinkish in the bud, are sweetly fragrant when open.
The vine is not densely covered with leaves, and the flowers are scattered here and there. I have read that it blooms in the summer and early fall, but here in Southern California, I find as many blossoms in January as at any other time.
Its fragrance is haunting and delicate, not overpowering as the night-blooming jasmine or gardenia. Hardier than some others, it will thrive as far north as Maryland.
This jasmine was introduced into England as early as 1597, where it was used to cover arbors and trellises.
On the continent, it has adapted itself through the central and southern sections almost as though it were native there.
This, or its improved form J. o. grandiflorum, is the variety cultivated extensively at Cannes and Grasse for the perfume industry. Indeed, we should say that Jasminum officinale is the jasmine.
Hardy Species For The North
J. mesneyi bears fragrant yellow blooms and is most accommodating, sprawling on the barren ground or draping its leaflets and flowers over dry hot banks.
It does not, however, have the romantic past of J. Officinale, for it is a fairly recent introduction from China.
A jasmine hardy in the North is the picturesque J. nudiflorum, a deciduous species whose yellow flowers appear before the heaves in early Spring.
Jasmine Sambac
Arabian or zambac jasmine, J. sambac, is a fairly low shrub or vine with larger leaves and flowers. It comes in two forms, with single or double blossoms. This species is one of the two that are added fresh to tea; 40 pounds of flowers are used with 100 pounds of tea.
The larger flower petals are later sifted out; for this reason, we find only a very few white petals among the black tea leaves.
44659 by Edna K. Neugebauer