Gardenia jasminoides 'Chuck Hayes'

The gardenia needs no introduction in the South; the scent alone has been stopping people in driveways for generations. What 'Chuck Hayes' adds to that old story is nerve in the cold. It traces back to the late 1970s and a Virginia Beach nurseryman named Charlie Hayes, who noticed a single-flowered gardenia that had come through a brutal freeze unbothered. He crossed it with a double-flowered plant and handed the seedlings to Dan Milbocker, a horticulturist at the Hampton Roads research station, who grew them out, picked the toughest, and eventually released it under Hayes's name. The result is a fully double, classically fragrant gardenia that behaves like a much more delicate plant has no right to.

The hardiness is not marketing. In side-by-side trials against 'Mystery', a gardenia already considered cold-tough, 'Chuck Hayes' came through field freezes that left its rival with heavy dieback losing only a few leaves on the windward side, and shrugged off lab temperatures that killed 'Mystery' outright. It holds reliably through Zone 7 and has been pushed colder by gardeners willing to give it a sheltered wall. For anyone in the Middle Atlantic who has watched a gardenia die back to the ground every hard winter, that difference is the whole point.

Then there is the bloom, which is the reason you grow any gardenia. Three-inch double flowers, creamy white going toward ivory, with the thick velvet texture and the heavy, carrying perfume that the species is famous for. The first flush runs through early summer; what sets this one apart is the encore, a genuine second wave in late summer that often carries on until frost. A mature plant settles in around four feet, rounded and densely clothed in glossy dark green leaves that hold all winter, so it earns its place in the border even in the months it isn't performing.

Part shade suits them, and in the warm South an eastern exposure is fine. Where winters are sharp, give it the opposite: a north or west aspect sheltered from early morning sun, which thaws cold-stunned foliage too fast and ruptures the leaf. Site it once, site it right, and it will scent the same patch of air every June for decades. Gardenia jasminoides is native to eastern Asia; this particular form is pure Tidewater Virginia, and one of the few that will follow you north.