This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have the South Carolina state flower: Yellow Jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens).
Yellow Jessamine is an evergreen perennial vine common throughout our forests, thickets, hedgerows, and wetlands. Jessamine climbs both high and low on thin but sturdy twining vines of mauve and burgundy. Although it does not climb so high as some other woodland vines, it makes due in the midstory of our forests. Where Jessamine really shines is on the wood line and fencerow. In sunny scrub, Jessamine thrives to smother shrubs and saplings. It’s narrow tangle of stems crisscrossing and ensnaring their woody victim in a net of leaves. But Jessamine is not so vigorous as to suffocate, just to stifle as it makes up lost time in winter with its year-round greenery. What is spectacular about Yellow Jessamine is its spring outfit.
As the soil begins to warm and the bugs begin to stir, so does our plant. Its web of wiry vines blister and burst forth into a glow of golden flowers. Five-lipped trumpets of saffron belch out the scent of spring in their cloud of sunlit song. Among the first to bloom, Yellow Jessamine feeds our Bumblebees as they stir from hibernation. A gift of color and a break of fast from an otherwise stingy vine. You see, Jessamine is miserly in its ways. It does not grow its own trunk but clings to that of its neighbors. Its growth is greedy as it gleams the solar succor between the leaves of its captive ladder. It does not lower its leaves in fall, holding them dearly through the cold to wring out the trickles of soft sunlight. Nor does it freely give that foliage to passersby, filling its flesh with neurotoxins to repulse other freeloaders. Yet, on winter’s eve it invites in insects on golden trays to share, just briefly, in a banquet; the profits of its penny-pinching.
