Jasminum nudiflorum

Jasminum nudiflorum, the winter jasmine, is the great cold-weather bloomer of the genus, a deciduous scrambling shrub from western China that opens bright yellow, six-petaled flowers on bare green stems in the depth of winter, often from January into March, long before the leaves return. The name says as much: nudiflorum, the naked-flowering jasmine, blooming on stripped, leafless wands.

Unlike the perfumed white jasmines, winter jasmine is scentless, trading fragrance for the far rarer gift of color in the coldest, barest weeks of the year. The arching green stems spread from a central crown and root where they touch the ground, so the plant makes an easy cascade over a wall or bank, a loose mound in the open, or, tied to a support, an informal climber. In China the flower is beloved as yingchun, the one that welcomes spring.

That Chinese name carries more than sentiment. Winter jasmine, yingchun, has a long place in traditional Chinese medicine, where the leaves and flowers were used to cool fevers and inflammation and, applied externally, to treat cuts, bruises, swellings, and wounds, and were sometimes brewed as a tea. Modern phytochemical work has found antioxidant and antibacterial compounds in the plant, though the research is still early. This is traditional-use and early-research information, shared for interest only, and not medical advice.

Winter jasmine is one of the toughest and easiest of the clan, hardy to zone 6, thriving in ordinary soil in sun or part shade, and asking only a hard cut every few years to renew the tangle of stems. Use the plant to spill down a slope or retaining wall, to cover a bank as a groundcover, to soften a fence, or trained up a trellis for a winter show. Full sun brings the heaviest bloom; plant where the yellow flowers can be seen from indoors in the cold months.