Written by Jake Ingram
Dovetailing with Jim Draper’s Feast of Flowers exhibit, The Museum is featuring a few groupings of North Florida Native Plants in various locations around the museum. Each week we will look at one of these plants in more detail.
The evergreen, late winter-flowering vine, Yellow Jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens) is placed at the base of each Cypress tree with the intention of providing floral interest in late February as it twines up the trunks of their host trees. This is a very common plant in many upland forest ecosystems that makes itself known when it flowers profusely as it climbs vigorously through the forest understory. This valuable landscape vine provides welcomed late winter color as a harbinger of spring and is a very useful evergreen twining vine in the home landscape.