Jasminum grandiflorum   

Jasminum grandiflorum L.

Family     :  Oleaceae

Common Name : പിച്ചകം (Mal)

चमेली(Hin)

                                 Spanish jasmine (Eng)

Royal Jasmine is a climbing shrub, 2-4 m long. Highly fragrant flowers are borne in 2-9-flowered cymes, in leaf axils, or at branch-ends. Flowers are white, opening flat-faced, tube 1.3-2.5 cm, petals often 5, oblong, 1.3-2.2 cm. Sepals are slender linear, 5-10 mm. Flower-stalks are 0.5-2.5 cm, middle pedicel of cymes prominently shorter. Bracts are linear, 2-3 mm. Branchlets are round in cross-section, angular or grooved. Leaves are opposite, pinnately cut or compound with 5-9 leaflets.

Large shrubs, sometimes scandent; branches striate, glabrous, green. Leaves opposite, 5-12 cm long; leaflets glabrous, dark green, the upper pair with a broad flat base, often confluent with the terminal leaflet, the terminal hardly larger, ovate lanceolate, acuminate; petiole and midrib margined. Flowers fragrant, in lax axillary or terminal cymes, the stalks of later flowers exceeding the first or central ones. Pedicels up to 3 cm long; bracts linear, 5 mm long. Calyx teeth 5, linear, 7-12 mm long. Corolla white, sometimes tinged with red outside, tube c. 2 cm long, lobes 5, oblong, shorter than the tube, involute at the margins.