Scented jasmine, farmer’s jasmine, pipe bush – care and cutting

The pipe bush or Philadelphus (mostly P. coronarius, European pipe bush) grows in every garden soil and also makes almost no demands on the location.

The farmer’s jasmine would like to have a nutritious soil with a little clay content, but any other garden soil will do as well, as long as you don’t put it in a sandpit. If you do have to put it in a sandpit, a Brandenburg or Berlin sandpit, for example. B., you should certainly enrich the soil a little with compost, and a little more fertilizer he can certainly take here too. Once a scented jasmine is two decades old, it hardly needs any fertilizer; it usually grows “like weeds” anyway.

It grows in the sun and in partial shade, but you shouldn’t expect a place almost in the dark – although it may still decide to thrive there, too, in their homeland most Philadelphus grow in the middle of bushes or as low-growth vegetation in mixed forests. There are supposed to be pipe bushes that grow under walnut trees (under which nothing actually grows because the walnut releases inhibitors to prevent competition from developing).

If you want or need to fertilize the pipe bush, you should make sure that too much nitrogen does not collect in the soil: If the nitrogen content in the soil becomes too high, the scented jasmine will continue to grow, but will no longer flower. If you observe exactly that, a bush in full growth but without flowering, the next few times you should use a natural fertilizer with little nitrogen.

The farmer’s jasmine develops a lot of leaf mass, especially in spring, you would have to make sure that the watering of this abundance is appropriate. The freshly planted pipe bush must also be watered very carefully; the older it gets, the more frugal it becomes in terms of watering.

Cut the farmer’s jasmine

Pipe bushes are powerfully vigorous once they have acclimatized themselves properly. They don’t necessarily need to be pruned, but pruning may be necessary to keep the overgrown growth in check.

Whether and how and how often you cut depends of course on how you cultivate the farmer’s jasmine:

As a single standing solitaire, the scented jasmine should usually grow into an eye-catcher, which unfolds as natural a growth form as possible and blooms wonderfully in spring. Then it must of course be allowed to grow, if it does not grow over your head, it will not actually be pruned at all.

The pruning of a solitary plant could be necessary to force pure wild growth into a shape that is more garden-friendly. Then you should cut back the pipe bush after flowering, whereby it is only thinned. Under no circumstances should such a single shrub simply be trimmed all around, at least not if you want to see flowers in the next season. The farmer’s jasmine does not develop its flowers on the long, strong shoots, but on the thinner side branches. So it begins with the development of its flowers for the next year on the freshly growing wood of the current season, and these young shoots would be cut away again with an all-round cut.

However, you can regularly remove older twigs from below, so you keep the shrub rejuvenated. You then really do a kind of “shrub design” by picking out a few overshooting long shoots every season and cutting them off at the bottom so that a younger shoot develops from there, which also develops many side shoots with flowers. If the pipe shrub gets really too big, it can also be resolutely capped, so you would only have to go without the flowers for a year or two.

If you grow your farm jasmine as a hedge, there will be no shape that resembles a hedge without regular pruning. How you decide to proceed depends on whether you want to create a hedge that grows more naturally with recognizable individual shrubs or whether it should be a “green box”. Both are possible, in the first case it is only thinned out, in the second case it is pruned vigorously, but this will mean that the hedge shows only very few flowers. The hedge bushes are also pruned after flowering.

Caution, misleading is not far from with the scented jasmine

First of all, not every scented jasmine has a scented smell, so you should be careful when shopping when choosing your pipe bush. The hybrids in particular are crossed quite wildly, and it can happen that one of the fragrant species has been crossed with a non-fragrant one, and the result then again with an only slightly fragrant … What comes out in terms of scent can be No more dealer really tell you. If you want to be sure that you are growing a fragrant shrub in your garden, you should buy from a specialist nursery or tree nursery where you can look at and “sniff” older specimens of genetically identical plants.

Then recipes are circulating on the Internet that explain how to make jasmine syrup from the flowers of the pipe bush. Not a good idea these days: Just as there used to be clearly distinguishable fragrant and non-fragrant pipe shrub species, there were also clearly distinguishable poisonous and non-poisonous pipe shrub species. The non-toxic pipe bushes were made into syrup, and these recipes still pop up on the internet today. Just as you cannot be sure that a pipe-bush hybrid was only bred from fragrant parent plants, you cannot be certain that it was only bred from non-toxic pipe-bush species. In the case of pipe bush hybrids, nobody can guarantee that a certain pipe bush is really non-toxic.

If you have small children who should be able to frolic in the garden unsupervised, you should generally consider whether a scented jasmine is the right plant for your garden … Unless you are contacting a specialist nursery that specializes in ecologically sound natural plants , and talk to the knowledgeable gardener about whether his certainly fragrant pipe bush is also one of the species that does not contain toxic substances.

In any case, in such a specialist nursery you have the best chances of getting a real, natural European pipe bush, the flowers of which develop a strong and pleasant scent. The scent of the flowers containing nectar often only develops properly in the evening, when it becomes so intense that many night owls are drawn in.

A shrub for connoisseurs

First of all, it simply has a high aesthetic value – the flowers are several centimeters in size, bright white with yellow stamens, they appear at the ends of the short shoots in clusters of five to ten flowers that are close to each other. A properly grown pipe bush in spring is an exciting sight, it is a single large mass of flowers.

Then he brings the garden to life by luring bees and bumblebees into the garden – at least in the fragrant form – and nourishing them with his nectar. Those who like to live in a healthy environment also perceive that as a pleasure. And of course the scent is also an extraordinary experience for humans, the little aromatherapy in the evening is sure to provide relaxation.

Diseases and pests

The farmer’s jasmine grows enormously in the spring, it is full of sap, which aphids find more delicious than almost anything else in the world. When it comes to scented jasmine, it is the black aphids that come to be eaten right on time in spring. The black aphid is exactly called the black bean louse, Aphis fabae, and it particularly likes to attack the shoots that are just sprouting, then whole branches can look like they have been painted black.

Whether mass infestation is a concern depends on how your pipe bush is doing. In spring he lets the aphids do their thing for the time being because, due to the efforts of spring shoots, he doesn’t have much strength left to defend himself against aphids. At some point, however, this “spring fattening” should stop by itself, for several reasons: The scented jasmine has sprouted and is gaining in resistance, the beneficial insects in your garden that are attracted by the aphids have in turn “eaten up” on the aphids, and the remaining black aphids go to the next host to start producing the next generations.

It would also be an unfortunate combination if there were peasant jasmine in your garden next to euonymus europaeus and common snowballs (Viburnum opulus). The black bean louse overwinters on the latter and then goes to the summer farmers well rested in April. B. heard of the scented jasmine. In autumn they then have to migrate back to the winter hosts to lay eggs. A large number of aphids usually die on both paths, unless you offer them the convenience of finding their summer and winter quarters right next to each other. Then replanting is the order of the day … in between you can of course also fight the aphids, there are some non-polluting agents here.

Scented jasmine, farmer’s jasmine, pipe bush, false jasmine?

The pipe bush is botanically called Philadelphus and belongs to the genus of pipe bushes in the hydrangea family. If there is a genus of whistling bushes, there should be several whistling bushes, and so are they. The Philadelphus are even a species-rich genus with around 70 species, which are mainly native to East Asia and North America. The following types and hybrid varieties are available from us:

• The best known is the common or European pipe bush, the Philadelphus coronarius, which grows up to 4 meters high. Important cultivars are named “Aureus” (dwarf shrub, approx. 1.1 m, yellowish leaves), “Nanus”, “Pumilus”, “Variegatus” and “Zeyheri”.
• Large-flowered pipe shrub, Philadelphus inodorus var. Grandiflorus, a lush shrub up to five meters high, large flowers without fragrance.
• Small-flowered or small-leaved pipe shrub, Philadelphus microphyllus, very fragrant tiny flowers.
• Oregon pipe bush, Philadelphus lewisii, 1.5 to 3 meters high, abundant flowers, parent of many hybrids.
• Later pipe shrub, Philadelphus incanus, early flowering species with unscented flowers.

These and other species are bred into an abundance of hybrids, most of which are referred to as Philadelphus x virginalis. Well-known hybrids of the European pipe bush are, for example, “Bouquet Blanc”, “Dame Blanche”, “Erectus”, “Girandole”, “Manteau d’Hermine”, “Mont-Blanc”, “Natchez” and “Snowstorm”.

Conclusion
The pipe bush is a beautiful and easy-care bush for every garden. You should only proceed carefully with the selection, otherwise it could happen that your scented jasmine does not smell. You could also be unpleasantly surprised by the development in size, if you do not find out more about the characteristics of the selected species or hybrid; pipe bushes can reach heights of between one and five meters.