welcome to Hort tube where we talk all things gardening my name is Jim Putnam and this is a fragrant tea olive this is a fragrant tea olive an evergreen shrub that gets quite large and has wonderful scented fragrant flowers in the fall and winter fragrant tea olives can actually end up reaching 20 feet in height over a very long period of time and probably even six to eight feet in width but are easily controlled much smaller than that tea olives are Hardy in zone seven to ten but really not in 7a in any open space in 7a you definitely want to use this as a foundation plant and even then you'll get an occasional winter where the newest leaves from the end of the season are going to be burnt tea olives do make great screening plants and they kind of grow naturally full at the base but they are a little slower growing than some other options you might want to consider using these will probably only get about six inches of growth a year so while like I say it's a great screening plant it is going to take a little while longer than some other things tea olives grow best in a half-a-day Sun or more they would really prefer 2/3 or 3/4 of a day Sun I don't think these perform that great in all day son you know sunup to sundown they are listed as full Sun on most websites but I always see them doing the best when they're taking a break late in the day or maybe they don't come into the Sun until sometime after lunch the best usage for a tea olive is either going to be on a corner on a foundation where you can really allow it to get some height or even tree form it really the best use for it is as a screening plant as a border between you and a neighbor and just allow it to get tall and wide and it's quite full without doing a lot of maintenance to it of course the main feature on tea olives is these wonderfully fragrant flowers in the fall and winter and early spring not a lot of flowering in the in the worst of the winter but most of the late fall and all of the early spring they're usually covered in these little white flowers these right here have not opened up all that much but I can smell it from where I'm standing next to it there's only two or three flowers open on this plant so it is quite nice that way and it blooms when pretty much nothing else flowering and so early in the spring as well before anything else is flowering so that's really really nice I've linked videos in the description below for either planting it in clay soils or sandy soils just follow those instructions and you should be fine these are actually pretty tough plants tea olives are reasonably drought tolerant once they're established I don't think you'd need to do much ongoing watering on these once they've been in the ground for a year if you do if it becomes abnormally dry and you do saturate the entire area around it so that it roots out into the surrounding soil we don't want to just water right at the base the first year it's in the ground you're definitely going to check it occasionally and water it well if it if it needs it and then let it dry out between waterings it's very important that we stress it a little bit just a little bit to encourage it to root out into the surrounding soil tea olives are acid loving plants so if you live in an area where the pH is you know low already you're probably okay with just any kind of general purpose fertilizer on these in the spring only do it once just do a slow release fertilizer in the spring let it run out by mid summer you don't want to encourage any new growth on this plant in the late summer or early fall it'll definitely get burned even in the warmer zones on this plant new growth will get burned on it in the fall if you live in an area that you don't you know you're more neutral pH you're definitely going to need to use a fertilizer for acid loving plants something that says azalea camellia rhododendron fertilizer or Holly tone would be a good choice fragrant tea olives almost certainly going to outgrow any space that's put in even as a screening plant the things going to just continue to grow and grow and grow it's slow enough growing that you don't have to do a lot of pruning on it but there will become a time where you're going to have to get after it and luckily these are pretty easy to just take a third out of the top at one time and that's what I would encourage you to do if the thing is ten-foot tall I'd cut it down to seven feet tall and that way you don't have to do it for two or three more years and you you know you don't want you don't want to end up pruning it constantly you're going to end up sacrificing some flowers on it there's really not a lot of problems on these they'll are susceptible to root rot in clay soils if you plant them too deep and over mulch them just follow my planting instructions in those videos and you should be fine with that they'll get the occasional chewing insect on the leaves this plant actually has some nibbles out of it from something else at the nursery was chewing on it and probably moved on to something else but typically in the landscape I rarely see any problem on the foliage on these so what are you waiting for even you can grow the low-maintenance winter flowering fragrant tea olive thank you for watching my video and if it was helpful please hit the like button and subscribe to my channel for future videos also comment below with any questions you have about tea olives thanks again