Gardenias

Gardenias are grown for two things: perfume, and evergreen structure that stays neat all year. The leaves are thick and glossy, the habit is dense, and the white flowers open through the warm months with a scent that carries on a still evening. That makes them a shrub for the places you pass every day: a front path, a courtyard, the bed under a bedroom window. They suit coastal, subtropical and warm temperate gardens, and they reward a gardener who is happy to water and feed. In dry inland heat, heavy frost or exposed wind they are hard work.

Ten lines are stocked here, in pot sizes from 80mm tubes up to advanced stock, so you can buy small and wait or plant something with presence now. Gardenia augusta Florida is the standard garden gardenia and the one most people picture: rounded, densely leafed, double white flowers, available from 80mm right through to 400mm. Gardenia augusta Magnifica is taller and more open with larger blooms, better as a specimen than clipped hard. Gardenia augusta Radicans is the prostrate form, low and spreading with smaller leaves, for edging and groundcover. Gardenia Radicans is the same habit in a single 170mm size. Gardenia Tinkerbell PBR stays compact enough for pots and narrow beds where Florida would outgrow the space. Gardenia Gold Magic opens white and ages to deep gold, so an established plant carries both colours at once. It comes as 5L stock only, as does Gardenia Professor Pucci, while Gardenia Grandiflora Star runs 140mm to 200mm. The native gardenia is a different plant altogether: Native Gardenia, Atractocarpus fitzalanii is a Queensland rainforest tree with large glossy leaves and scented white flowers, stocked from 140mm pots up to 1000L for screening and shade, and listed twice here, under that name and under the older name Randia fitzalanii.

Plant into acidic, free draining soil worked over with compost, in morning sun with cover from hot afternoon sun inland. Water deeply and consistently through bud and flower, feed after each flush with a fertiliser made for acid loving plants, mulch to keep the root zone cool, and prune lightly after flowering to hold the shape. Where gardenias fail in Australian gardens, the cause is usually alkaline soil. Planted tight against a rendered wall, a concrete path or a new slab, lime leaches into the root zone, the pH climbs, and the plant can no longer take up iron. Leaves turn yellow between green veins, buds colour and drop before they open, and the shrub sits there for years without dying or growing. Test your soil pH before you dig, keep the bed clear of fresh concrete, or use a pot with an azalea and camellia mix so you control the pH yourself.

Gardenias plant well beside camellias and hydrangeas, which take the same part shade; camellias share the acid soil requirement, and hydrangeas simply colour blue in it. See flowering plants for more scent and seasonal colour, or hedges for a clipped low border rather than loose shrubs. Every order ships farm-direct with flat $99 delivery across QLD, NSW, VIC, SA, ACT and WA, a $399 minimum order, and the 30-Day Healthy Plant Guarantee.