I’ve had this Gardenia for at least three years. Every spring it blooms, but this spring it is going to produce many of these beautiful, fragrant flowers since there are bunches of buds this year. For the previous couple of years, I only got a small handful of blooms.
There are hundreds of varieties of Gardenias; this one has a very strong and pleasant fragrance, but I’m not sure of it’s exact subspecies.
Click on the image to the right to see the 800×600 version.
This is a general description of Gardenias from WikiPedia:
Gardenia is a genus of about 250 species of flowering plants in the family Rubiaceae, native to the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, southern Asia, Australasia and Oceania.
The genus was named by Carl Linnaeus after Dr. Alexander Garden (1730-1791), Scottish-born American naturalist.
They are evergreen shrubs and small trees growing to 1-15 m tall. The leaves are opposite or in whorls of three or four, 5-50 cm long and 3-25 cm broad, dark green and glossy with a leathery texture. The flowers are solitary or in small clusters, white, or pale yellow, with a tubular-based corolla with 5-12 lobes (‘petals’) from 5-12 cm diameter. Flowering is from about mid-spring to mid-summer and many species are strongly scented.