Jasmines

I have been moved by coming across a fake jasmine to inform myself about jasmines more generally. I had thought that jasmine was the vigorous shrub with small yellow flowers that we have growing on the front of our house.  Plus, more vaguely, that there was a colour called jasmine, a sort of pale yellow.

The fake jasmine is snapped above, aka Confederate jasmine, aka Trachelospermum jasminoides, that is to say not a member of the jasmine genus at all.

While our jasmine is properly known as winter jasmine, aka Jasminum nudiflorum.

For all of which see references 1, 2 and 3.

Complete with rather curious flowers, very strongly scented.

Five petals yes, but they seem to be fused at the base. And five stamens.

Which agrees pretty well with the story at reference 1:

'... The fragrant flowers, which are borne in spring to early summer, are white, 1–2 cm ... diameter, with a tube-like corolla opening out into five petal-like lobes. The white, rotate actinomorphic flowers have a calyx formed by five narrow, smooth, reflexed sepals 2−5 mm, much shorter than the corolla tube. The latter has a dilated tube in the middle, 5−10 mm long, terminating in 5 obliquely bypassed lobes, all curved, resembling a helix turning counterclockwise. The five stamens are inserted in the middle of the corolla tube...'.

While Gemini has a pretty good stab at dealing with:

'Is there some unifying feature which pulls all the jasmines together, that is to say the jasmine genus with the false jasmines?'

The odd glitch apart, he builds quite a good story around the snap above, explaining that while the flowers of the winter jasmine, a true jasmine, do not smell, they do have the right form. As can be seen at reference 3 - but I shall have to check when I next have access to some, just to be sure. And while they do not twine, they do scramble, which does just as well.

Colours are dealt with at reference 4 and that, I think, will do for now.

PS: the word 'jasmine' comes to us from the Persian, that is to say from Iran. I wonder if POTUS, who must have plenty of the stuff in his gardens, knows? Would he care if he did? Get it all rooted up? Get it renamed?

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachelospermum_jasminoides. The fake.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasminum_nudiflorum. The real thing.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasmine. The genus. Around 200 of them.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasmine_(color). The colour.