Growing For Success | Ugly duckling to beauty with a fragrant bloom

Most times, once you have shown the customer a selection of assorted plants to choose from, the plants will sell themselves based on their appearance of flowers, foliage, form or structure.

However, sometimes some of the best and most exciting plants are just plain ugly ducklings when young.

It becomes a tough sell to convince customers to take the chance on such a terrible-looking plant.

A perfect example of this is the tree gardenia, which is in full flower right now and an absolute standout as a mature plant in a few lucky gardens across the valley, but we will still struggle to sell the 10 or so immature plants we have in stock at the moment.

Gardenia Thunbergia, as they are botanically known, is native to South Africa. It grows to around four to five metres high by about two to three metres wide in a roughly oval shape.

The leaves are glossy green and usually appear in groups of three around the branchlets, forming a dense canopy of foliage. Their abundant flowers are white, perfectly formed and about seven centimetres across, narrowing down to a long tubular throat. They have a heavy, sweetly scented, very tropical fragrance, especially in the evening.

The fragrance is not overpowering and hangs in the air for quite a distance around the plant and only slightly intensifies as you get closer to it. Their flowers are usually pollinated by hawk moths rather than bees and will develop a complex, fibrous egg-shaped seed pod that can often stay on the tree from one year to the next.

This is not all that common here, with my tree at home only setting about half-a-dozen seed pods a year. However, further north, in more tropical climates where they will put a lot more seed out, you may need to prune the pods off due to the sheer weight of the branches.

Tree gardenia can make a lovely single-specimen tree or be grown as part of a mixed planting or even a hedge that will require little-to-no trimming.

Given its hardiness, medium growth rate, lovely form, abundant and beautiful flowers, and beautiful tropical fragrance, why is it so hard to sell?

Well, it is butt ugly as a young plant with gnarled, contorted leaves that look like something has been eating them for breakfast, lunch, and tea. The form has multiple leaders, all competing against each other with no rhyme or reason for the structure.

It stays this way in the garden for about two to three years until one year, without really noticing it takes place, you will walk out and find it has transformed into the beautiful tree that it was always going to be.

Gleditsia sunburst is another tree like this that, if used in the right place and given enough space and enough time, makes a tremendous, pendulous, graceful shade tree with striking golden foliage.

Where for the first three years in the ground it is a gangly, sparse, and unruly-looking tree, a lot of people give up on it and unknowingly pull it out, probably one year short of it coming into its mature form and not realising what they have just missed out on.

These are just two examples that we carry in the nursery along with others like the Brachychiton flame trees and Kurrajongs, but I feel none are as drastic or beautiful as Gardenia Thunbergia.