Jasminum nudiflorum Seeds | Winter Jasmine
LATIN NAME: Jasminum nudiflorum
COMMON NAME: Winter Jasmine
Plant Profile
Jasminum nudiflorum is a deciduous scandent shrub, throwing out long arching stems that reach 3 or 4 metres if they are given something to lean on and trail along the ground where they are not. The stems are square in section and green through the winter, and the leaves, pairs of them each carrying three small dark green leaflets, appear only in summer.
A stem that lies on damp soil for a season roots at the nodes, so a neglected plant becomes a wide thicket rather than a tidy shrub. That is a nuisance in a small bed and a gift on a bank, where the rooted nodes hold the surface together and fill the gaps without any planting.
Winter jasmine is the hardiest of the commonly grown jasmines, taking winter cold that kills the scented species outright, and it is used in breeding work as the source of that toughness. In tissue culture the genus is straightforward, with nodal explants multiplying on cytokinin-supplemented media, so a promising seedling can be bulked up quickly.
The plant is not a true climber; it leans.
Winter jasmine has no tendrils and no twining stems, so it must be tied in to a trellis, a wire grid or the rungs of a fan against a wall. Start with a young plant, fan out four or five stems and tie them at intervals as they extend, and cut out the weakest shoots at the base. The plant flowers well on a north or east wall, which is unusual and useful, and it will cascade over a retaining wall.
Science & Biotechnology
The genus is grown for flowers, but its chemistry and its cold tolerance both have a following in research.
The olive family is defined chemically by secoiridoid glucosides, and oleuropein and ligustroside, which give olive leaf and privet their bitterness, are typical of it. Winter jasmine tissue carries its own secoiridoids alongside simple phenolics and coumarins, and the green stem, metabolically active all winter, keeps a measurable load of them while the plant is leafless.
Uses & Benefits
The scented jasmines owe their perfume to volatile benzenoid esters and terpenoid alcohols, and to the jasmonate family: methyl jasmonate, now the standard elicitor used in plant cell culture, was first characterised from the flowers of a highly scented jasmine. That volatile load is missing here. The flowers of winter jasmine are bright yellow, 2 to 2.5 cm across, with five or six broad lobes on a short tube, borne singly in the leaf axils on wood made the previous season.
Growing from Seed
Stems cut in bud will open indoors in a jar of water, and a few long shoots brought in late in the winter bring the flowering forward. On a rough bank, plant winter jasmine in groups and let the shoots run; the rooting nodes knit the surface and hold ground through the winter. Slugs can strip young shoots in a wet spring, so protect new plantings with grit.
Most disappointment with winter jasmine comes from poor pruning, and the timing of the cut decides next winter’s display.
Flowers are produced on short laterals made during the previous growing season, so the cut must follow the flowering and nothing later. As soon as the display is over, shorten the laterals that carried flowers to within two or three buds of the framework, and thin out some of the oldest stems at the base to keep the plant flowering low. Never cut in autumn: the wood you remove is the next crop of flowers. Water a wall plant in dry spells, because a wall takes moisture from the root zone.
Seed is set sparingly in cultivation, so most plants are raised from cuttings or layers, but a fresh pod gives seed worth sowing. Sow it as soon as it is ripe on the surface of a gritty, moist compost, cover it with 3 mm of fine grit and give it a cold, moist spell in a frame over the winter, as a cool period suits it. Prick the seedlings out at the two-true-leaf stage, pot them on at about 8 cm, and keep them shaded through the first summer.
Our Take
If you have a wall that catches the sun, winter jasmine belongs on it. For scent, put the perfumed jasmines somewhere else: an Arabian jasmine for a warm greenhouse, or a common white jasmine for a mild wall out of doors. In the same family and flowering at the same hopeful moment of the year, a weeping forsythia makes the natural partner at the foot of the slope. Prune the moment the last flower drops.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Winter Jasmine: