gardenia

Gardenia is named after Alexander Garden (1730–1791), a Scottish-born physician who practiced medicine in Charleston, South Carolina, and was one of colonial America's most active amateur naturalists. Garden corresponded extensively with Carl Linnaeus and other European naturalists, collecting and sending specimens from the American South to Sweden and England. The genus was named for him by John Ellis, an English naturalist and fellow correspondent of Linnaeus, who proposed the name Gardenia in a letter to Linnaeus in 1757. The irony that Gardenia — one of the world's most famously fragrant flowering plants — would come to bear the name of a man who collected lizards, snakes, and fish rather than primarily botanical specimens is the kind of contingency that botanical nomenclature accepts without fuss. Garden was a loyal correspondent of the European scientific network; a genus name was the appropriate return.

The plants now classified as Gardenia are native to the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, southern Asia, Australasia, and the Pacific islands, with the greatest diversity in Asia and Africa. The species most familiar in Western horticulture, Gardenia jasminoides (Cape jasmine), is native to China, Japan, and Vietnam rather than to any gardening tradition in the Americas or Africa. In China the gardenia — zhī zǐ (栀子) — has been cultivated for over a thousand years, documented in Tang dynasty poetry and used in both fabric dyeing (the flowers and fruit yield a yellow dye) and traditional medicine (the dried fruit is used for clearing heat and treating anxiety in the Chinese pharmacopeia). The plant was well known to Chinese and Japanese gardeners centuries before a Scottish doctor in Charleston entered the European botanical network.

The fragrance of Gardenia jasminoides is among the most chemically complex of any flower, composed of over 200 identified volatile compounds including linalool, benzyl acetate, methyl benzoate, and various terpenes that interact to produce what perfumers describe as a 'white floral' accord: creamy, indolic, slightly animalic, with a heavy richness that few other flowers approach. Gardenia absolute — the concentrated aromatic extract — is one of the most expensive natural perfumery materials, in part because the flowers cannot be steam-distilled (heat destroys the aromatic compounds) and must be processed by solvent extraction or enfleurage, the ancient fat-absorption method in which flowers are laid on grease-coated glass until the fat absorbs the scent. A pound of gardenia absolute requires thousands of flowers and days of labor.

Alexander Garden, the physician for whom all this fragrance is named, eventually found himself on the wrong side of colonial history. A committed Loyalist, he refused to support the American Revolution and had his property confiscated; he spent the later part of his life in London and Nova Scotia, never returning to South Carolina. He was, by all accounts, genuinely devoted to natural history and a careful correspondent, but his political convictions cost him everything he had built in the colonies. His name survives in a flower that is now a global perfume industry commodity and a houseplant in millions of homes — the South Carolina gardens where he practiced medicine and collected specimens have been replaced by a city that remembers him, if at all, in the name of a flower that came from China.