Naked jasmine

It's been so warm this winter forsythias have started blooming. Granted there are a few forsythia bushes around town showing an odd bloom or two, but the shrubs that are exhibiting a full display of blooms right now are not forsythia at all. They are a winter-blooming heirloom ornamental known as winter jasmine or naked jasmine, Jasminum nudiflorum.

The species name nudiflorum means naked flower. The small, shiny oval leaves of this shrub clustered in groups of three drop off early in the fall, exposing evergreen angular stems. By Christmas the flower buds are swollen, and now in the cold of winter (as they do every year regardless of the temperature) are in full bloom.

Plant specimens were first collected by Alexander von Bunge for the Royal Botanical Garden at St. Petersburg, Russia in 1830, but he misidentified them and specimens floated around European scientific institutions with the wrong name until 1846.

In 1844, British botanical explorer, Robert Fortune, sent specimens from Nanjing, China to the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew. Fortune wrote, "a very ornamental dwarf shrub... perfectly hard in this country [China]. It is deciduous; the leaves falling off in its native country early in autumn, and leaving a number of prominent flower buds, which expand in early spring, often when snow is on the ground."

In 1846, John Lindley identified it as a new species, naming it Jasminum nudiflorum in the Journal of the Horticultural Society of London. In that journal he also introduced it as an excellent trailing winter-blooming shrub for gardeners, and it quickly gained popularity in England.

Winter jasmine soon made its way to America. By 1855 it was listed in an American nursery catalog and became a favorite of Southern gardens. In an 1856 issue of the The Southern Cultivator, Robert Nelson of Macon, Ga., wrote, "Jasminum nudiflorum, the very earliest blooming shrub in our latitude. Even pretty severe frosts do not hurt the bright yellow flowers."

In English gardens it became a favorite shrub planted atop walls, as the branches cascade over walls highlighting their brilliant winter display of tubular yellow flowers with six flared petals. No doubt, in the late 19th-century, with its abundant stone retaining walls established, unnamed souls intent on beautifying Eureka Springs thought this was an ornamental shrub of choice. Hence, we still enjoy this heirloom winter-blooming beauty today.