Winter Jasmine

I first met this plant in June, six years ago. It was a heaping mound of green growing along the top of a wall, and I was a skinny college kid who'd found a summer job gardening for an OBGYN who had built himself a complex of restaurants, B&B's, and coffeeshops in downtown Chattanooga. The eccentric Dr. who hired me, along with the rest of the grounds crew, weren't too positive that I'd last a week pulling weeds and mowing grass in the East Tennessee heat. They put me through my paces early, like the day when the good Dr. walked me over to the cascade of Winter Jasmine running 50 feet along a wall, handed me a 25 lb. power tool - Echo gas hedge trimmers - that resembled a chainsaw with meaner teeth, and said, "let's see what you can do with that..." A thousand drops of sweat and two burning shoulders later, I switched off the machine. The giant Dr. walked up and said, "Looks good." I was proud, but relieved that I would eventually return to the college classroom in preparation for a life of teaching, not pruning. Oops.

I never knew the same plant would show up in front of our first house in the midst of one of the coldest winters I've ever known in the southeast. And true to its common name, Winter Jasmine, Jasminum Nudiflorum announced itself at the bottom of our front steps a few weeks ago. From a distance, you might mistake it for forsythia, but the time of year that this multitude of yellow flowers arrives is your main clue that this is something else, something not-so-native, something brought to our neck of the woods from China. If you do have it in your garden, try to remember not to prune its tangled mass of viny growth in the fall or early winter because you'll chop off all the quiet buds that will eventually become these lovely blooms. If you plant it in the right place, you might not ever need to prune it except every half decade or so to nuke all the old growth...Just be sure you do it after the blooms have passed late in the winter when the forsythia is starting to show.