Jasminum sp.

Some plants arrive at the nursery already wearing a mystery, and this jasmine is one of them. The stock was gathered high on a mountain pass above the White Water River in northwestern Yunnan, at roughly ten thousand feet, in the tumbled country of travertine terraces and snow peaks near Baishuitai that the Naxi people hold sacred. The collector, hedging as any honest collector will, noted only that this was probably a scandent shrub, and that guarded phrase is still the truest thing anyone can say about the plant's habit.

Jasminum belongs to Oleaceae, the olive family, in the good company of lilac, forsythia, and privet, a genus of roughly two hundred species scattered across warm Eurasia and Africa. The name travels almost unchanged from the Persian yasmin, carried west through Arabic and Old French before Linnaeus set the word in Latin. Scandent is the botanist's term for a plant that leans and clambers rather than truly twines, and many of the hardy Asian jasmines live exactly this way, arching through neighboring shrubs on long green wands.

What color the flowers will be is the open question, and we would rather say so than pretend. High-elevation Yunnan holds jasmines of both persuasions: the white, powerfully fragrant climbers of the Jasminum officinale group, recorded as high as four thousand meters, and the yellow, faintly scented or scentless scrambling shrubs of the group once called Chrysojasminum, among them the widespread Jasminum humile. Because this collection reads as a scrambling shrub rather than a twining vine, a small yellow flower is the likelier outcome, though white has not been ruled out until the plant chooses to bloom. Anyone hoping for the classic jasmine perfume should know that fragrance belongs chiefly to the white species, so we make no promises on that front.

For the collector of rare woody plants, the appeal is exactly the gamble. Wild seed and cuttings from three thousand meters in Yunnan should carry real cold tolerance, and we expect the plant to prove comfortable in USDA zones 7 through 9, perhaps colder once tested. Give the jasmine full sun to part shade and sharp drainage, a wall or an old shrub to lean into, and the patience to let a wild thing declare itself. Grow this one for the pleasure of watching an unnamed mountain jasmine settle into a Southern garden, and for the small thrill of being among the first to learn what it is.