RSS Feed
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Jasmine or jessamine - both are beautiful
This jasmine will spread by rooting if the limbs touch the ground, eventually resulting in a bigger spread for the shrub. Winter jasmine is easy to get along with. It prefers sun, but will tolerate shade. Even poor soil and drought don't trouble it much. Confederate jasmine, which is very fragrant, is an evergreen, vining shrub ideal for hanging over walls or covering arbors or trellises. This plant is sometimes called "star jasmine" because of the small, white clusters of star-shaped flowers it produces in late spring or early summer. This jasmine shares the ease of care with all the jasmines. Give it full sun and average garden soil and it's your friend forever. Insects, disease and deer leave it alone. It can be grown as a cascading hedge, but this use requires a great deal of pruning and shaping. Cuttings taken at any time root easily. Carolina jessamine, native to the Piedmont, has the endearing habit of blooming in the woods in late spring. You will see little yellow blips of yellow up in the trees, visible even when driving faster than you should down the interstate. It is fragrant, but you may have to climb a tree to enjoy it. It climbs by means of an evergreen wiry vine and will climb bare walls which the jasmines cannot do. It makes an interesting meandering ground cover and the edges can be mowed to keep it in bounds. Carolina jessamine is the state flower of South Carolina and Clemson University web site cautions us not to confuse their favorite plant with the jasmines. My apologies to South Carolina, but I do have a lot of difficulty remembering which of these plants is a jessamine and which is a jasmine. Mostly I just shrug my shoulders and call them all 'jasmine." My brother has all three of the above growing in his garden and they don't seem to care what I call them.
Dora Garrick Fleming is a native of Grove Hill.
|
for larger version       |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
