Goodbye Grif's Gardenia

I’ve made all sorts of stupid plant choices in the name of scent. I’ve bought and tried to coddle along demanding or marginally hardy species in the hopes of a singularly fragrant bloom. I think I should no longer visit the Fragrant Plants forum on Garden Web because it just sends me into another tailspin of wasted money, time, and effort. Garden catalogs are no better. For instance, I totally fell for Park’s Seed’s promise of a gardenia hardy to zone 6. Ha!

I purchased and planted two Gardenia augusta Grif’s Select in Fall of ’05. I dug a large hole for each plant and backfilled it with heavily amended soil, hoping that I had provided adequate drainage. The following spring, after a lengthy wait for signs of life, I yanked them from the ground and abandoned the plants in a corner. I later discovered that one of the gardenias had indeed survived, but just barely. I kept it watered over the summer and then planted it in a different spot in Fall of ’06. This spring, it was yanked again. Now, it is really dead.

I can’t say for sure whether it was our nasty clay soil (gardenias abhor clay) or the zone 6 winters that killed the gardenias. Global warming may make outdoor gardenias in Cincinnati a true possibility in the next few years, but I think I’ll just stick with the hothouse variety, kept in the sunroom during the winter and on the deck in the summer, for now. Upon reflection, I guess I haven’t learned much of a lesson at all. I still go through an extraordinary amount of effort for a novel scent.