Source: Lots of Plants (NC)
Size shipped: 3 gallon pot (measured about 1', but it was quite dense)
Planted:
First flowering: August 2021, miraculously
I forget exactly how I found out about Lots of Plants, but when I found that they had this
gardenia in stock in a good size and Wilson Bros. was out of stock on the Swan Queen that I had
really wanted, I decided to give them a try.
And how'd they do on my first order with them? A mixed bag, as the crown looked nice and
dense and in good shape,
if a little small for a 3-gallon... but then I took off the pot and discovered that the
root ball only made up the top half or less of it; the rest was just was loose substrate.
Clearly this plant had only been potted up recently. Now on one hand, when I pay 3-gallon prices,
I expect a root ball that's the better part of 3 gallons. But on the other hand, this means it wasn't
rootbound...
Unfortunately I must not have been looking closely enough at this plant on my near-daily visits, because at one point in late May I noticed an alarming amount of brown color and desiccation in the leaves. Throughout June it became more and more obvious that the problem was clay soil that stayed wet too long. I had dug up the site the previous autumn to try to let the winter's freeze-thaw cycles do their thing, but it didn't seem to work -- it's possible that I hadn't waited long enough to let the soil dry out before I dug it (as one should never work clay soil when it's wet). Then at some point (was it May?) I had added cardboard and mulch to suppress weeds, but it looks like that may also have contributed to keeping too much moisture around for a gardenia (especially one with only 1-2 gallons of root ball) to handle. By late June I had finally had enough and moved it back into a pot, noting that there had not been much root growth into the surrounding soil and also that distressingly large clumps of the root ball were falling away easily. It looked like the Jewel still had not opened a single bud at this point, though the buds themselves were quite obvious and its relative the Summer Snow gardenia had been pushing new growth (though slowly) for at least a month already.
The Fafard 52 seemed at first to be porous enough for the gardenia's needs (though not as porous as the mix of pine bark and arcillite/zeolite that I'd been using for other pots), as the gardenia held on and slowly started producing new growth over the rest of the summer. In fact, it ended up blooming for the first time in August 2021, even producing more blooms than the one lone flower the Summer Snow came up with that season. Unfortunately, the damage was already too great, and the plant did not survive the autumn.