San Jose Fortune’s Tea Olive Osmanthus – 3 Gallon Pot

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If you love the fragrant white and orange Tea Olives, you’ll also love this unique and amazing hybrid that inherits almost the same perfume of Osmanthus fragrans and the cold hardiness of Osmanthus heterophyllus. Just like its parents, San Jose is a large evergreen shrub or small tree that produces abundant, wonderfully fragrant white flowers in fall and early winter. The flowers are small but boy do they pack a fragrant punch! All it takes is one San Jose to fill the front or backyard with a heavenly scent of perfume. The scent is really indescribable. It’s just one of those things you have to experience for yourself. The best we can do is say that they smell something like sweet apricot. The young leaves of San Jose are unique as well; finally toothed all the way around and very deep green. What’s more, we’ve heard San Jose Osmanthus is cold hardy to as low as -12F.

Growing 15 to 20 feet tall and 10 to 12 feet wide with no pruning, San Jose Osmanthus can be grown as a large shrub or small tree. It can easily be kept smaller with pruning. As a shrub, its dense foliage makes it ideal for use as a natural or clipped evergreen hedge, privacy screen, or background, or to frame corners or fill voids between widely-spaced windows in home foundation plantings. As it grows taller, lower branches can be removed to form a highyl attractive small tree for use as a focal point specimen in sunny to partially shaded landscape borders and home foundation plantings. A fine addition to fragrance gardens, cottage gardens, white theme gardens and the Xeriscape (low water needs).

Suggested Spacing:  6 to 8 feet apart for a solid hedge or privacy screen;  16 feet or more apart for space between plants

Note: For our customers who live and garden North of USDA Cold Hardiness Zone 6b, where this Osmanthus variety is not reliably winter hardy, you’ll be happy to know it can be grown in containers that can be brought indoors during winter and placed back outside when temperatures warm up in spring. 

San Jose Osmanthus is very easy to grow in most any average, moist but well-drained soil and full sun to mostly shade. We suggest at least 3 hours of direct sunlight per day or all-day lightly filtered sun for best flowering. Exceptionally drought tolerant when established. Over decades of growing this plant in our own gardens, we’ve seen no insect or disease problems and deer don’t touch it. As with many other plants, a constantly soggy or wet soil can be problematic. Np pruning necessary however responds well to to it for shaping purposes or hedges.