Yellow jessamine, the state flower of South Carolina

How to recognize it

Yellow jessamine is an evergreen woody vine with thin, wiry stems that climb by twining, reaching about 10 to 20 feet; without support it sprawls as a ground cover. Its fragrant, bright yellow, funnel-shaped flowers are up to about 1.5 inches long, with five short lobes, borne singly or in small clusters. The glossy, lance-shaped leaves, up to about 3 inches long, grow in opposite pairs and may turn bronze or purplish in winter.

It blooms from late winter into spring, roughly February to May, and sometimes again in the fall. The fruit is a flat capsule up to an inch long that ripens from September to November.

Where it grows

Yellow jessamine is native to the southeastern United States and south into Mexico and Central America. In South Carolina it is common in the Piedmont, the Sandhills and the coastal plain, climbing over shrubs, fences and up trees in woods and thickets.

Where to see it

Look along woodland edges, thickets and roadsides across the state in late winter and early spring, when the vines are often among the first plants in flower. It is also widely planted on trellises and fences.

Beautiful but poisonous

Every part of the yellow jessamine is poisonous to people, because of the alkaloids it contains, and its pollen is harmful to honeybee colonies. The plant was once the source of a drug called gelsemium.

The state flower since 1924

In 1923 the General Assembly named a commission to recommend a state flower. It chose the yellow jessamine, citing that the vine grows in every part of the state and is one of the first signs of spring, and the House and Senate adopted it on February 1, 1924. The flower is honored in the State House too: sprigs of jessamine are etched on the blade of the Senate’s Sword of State.