Hedychium coronarium

Few flowers announce themselves the way white ginger lily does after dark. Through late summer and early fall, the tall leafy stems open dense terminal spikes of pure white flowers, each bloom shaped like a hovering butterfly with a small yellow-green stain at the throat, and each one throwing a rich, sweet perfume that carries across a warm garden in the evening air. The scent is jasmine-deep and unmistakable, the reason the flowers are gathered for perfume and personal adornment across the tropics.

The name is as pretty as the plant. Hedychium joins the Greek hedys, sweet, and chion, snow, sweet snow, for the fragrant white flowers; the species name coronarium marks a bloom long used for garlands and crowns. This is a true ginger, a member of the Zingiberaceae that spreads by thick aromatic rhizomes and throws long, canna-like leaves. Despite the common name Hawaiian ginger lily, the plant is no native of the islands: the wild home is the Eastern Himalaya and the hills of southern Asia, from India, Nepal, and Bhutan through Myanmar and Thailand into southern China, and the ginger merely naturalized in Hawaii long after arriving with people.

One country claims the flower outright. In Cuba the white ginger lily is la mariposa, the butterfly, and has stood as the national flower since 1936, an emblem of purity, peace, and the long fight for independence. The story goes that Cuban women wove the blooms into their hair and dress in colonial times and used the intricate, folded inflorescence to hide and carry secret messages for the independence cause, a small white flower pressed into the service of a nation.

In the garden, give white ginger lily rich, moist ground in sun to part shade and let the rhizomes build a lush tropical stand for a border, a poolside, a pond margin, or a large container set where the evening fragrance drifts toward a door or a seat. The plant grows fast and spreads steadily, so allow room or a contained bed, and note the difference climate makes: in the warm, wet tropics the ginger can run aggressively and is considered invasive along waterways, while in temperate zones 8 to 10 winter dormancy keeps the plant well-mannered. A deep mulch carries the rhizomes through cold at the northern edge.