The Flower You Smell Before You See
My first remembrance of tuberoses was visiting a friend in Houston. They had them growing in pots as well as in the ground by their pool, and I couldn’t believe the sweet fragrance that filled the summer air. Ever since that visit I have tried to recreate that fragrance in my own gardens. You don’t walk up on a tuberose. It reaches you first — twenty, thirty feet out on a still July evening — and then you go looking for the plant.
The single tuberose is one of the toughest, most reliable bloomers in this group. It’s actually a member of the same family as agave, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it handles a Texas summer. Most of ours start blooming in mid-July and keep sending up stalks of bloom until the first of December.
A Flower Older Than the Conquest
Very few plants in this catalog have a longer human history than this one, and none has a stranger one.
The Aztecs grew the tuberose centuries before the Spanish arrived in 1519, and they called it omixochitl — from omitl, bone, and xochitl, flower. The bone flower. Anyone who has looked at that white waxy bud in the dusk knows exactly why. They cultivated it in their gardens and strung the blossoms into necklaces and crowns for ceremony.
Here is the part that still gets me. Kew puts the tuberose’s native range in a narrow slice of Mexico — southern Guanajuato and northern Michoacán — but nobody has reported finding it growing wild there, or anywhere else, in modern times. I want to be careful with that. It isn’t that somebody has declared it extinct in the wild; no such assessment exists. It’s that a plant with a known homeland has not turned up in it. The usual explanation is that Aztec cultivation simply replaced the wild population, and that’s plausible, but it’s an explanation, not a finding.
What’s not in doubt is that the tuberoses you can buy today all descend from plants that were already in cultivation before Cortés walked into Tenochtitlán. The Spaniards met them in the early 1500s in the Aztec capital, in what is now Mexico City. What they carried home was a garden plant with no wild counterpart anyone has been able to find since.
How It Reached Europe — and the South
A French missionary is generally credited with carrying the tuberose out of the New World and into Europe — Father Théophile Minuti, who sent bulbs back to Provence. You will see that story dated to 1530 in a good many places, including some I respect. It can’t be right: Minuti wasn’t born until 1592. The real date is closer to 1630, and I’d guess a century-old typo is behind the whole thing. I mention it because I nearly printed 1530 myself.
What I can put a firm date on is 1629, when John Parkinson wrote the plant up in The Garden of Pleasant Flowers. He filed it as an Indian jacinth — the old books spell it Iacinth — and said the flowers were “of a very sweet scent, or rather strong and heady.”
Strong and heady. That’s been the argument about this flower ever since. It was grown at the Grand Trianon under Louis XIV, where the beds were planted in sunken pots that could be lifted and swapped so something was always in bloom; how much of that rotation was tuberose specifically, and how often, I’ve seen claimed with more confidence than the record supports. Somewhere in the nineteenth century the scent picked up a funeral association in the English-speaking world, and that probably cost it a few generations of garden fashion — though the best-documented funeral traditions for tuberose are Mexican, Thai, and Indian, not English. In Mexico it’s the nardo, and it still goes on funeral altars and graves. In India it’s a wedding flower. In Hawaii it goes into leis. The bone flower is still working both ends of a human life, five hundred years on.
It came into southern gardens the way most good things did — as a passalong, grown for scent and for cutting, in dooryards and along porches where you’d catch it coming and going. By the time C.L. Allen wrote Bulbs and Tuberous-Rooted Plants in 1893, the trade had shifted: tuberose growing had been an Italian business for years, and American growers had taken it over to the point that Allen reckoned the world’s markets were mostly supplied out of American fields. Ours come out of our own rows in East Texas.
Single vs. Double
This is the single — one clean row of six tepals flaring off the end of a long white tube. It’s the older form of the two, the one Parkinson described. Alongside it there’s the double, ‘The Pearl’, which packs the flower with extra petals until it looks like a small gardenia.
Between the two, the single is the better cut flower. It lasts longer in the vase, the individual florets are more graceful, and to my nose the fragrance carries just as far. The double is showier up close. If you can only plant one and you’re planting it to cut and bring inside, plant the single.
Planting & Care
Planting a tuber is one of the most enjoyable things you can do — you can’t do it wrong. Plant it tip down, or if you aren’t sure, lay it on its side. It doesn’t matter which side. The tuber will fix itself. Just don’t bury it: no more than 2–3 inches of soil above it. Allen was telling people the same thing back in 1893 — plant them too deep and they’re less likely to flower — and it’s still the most common way to lose a season.
Sun: Full sun. Yes, you read that correctly. In 2022 we had five straight weeks of heat-advisory temperatures and they did great. A little late-afternoon shade is fine. Much more than that and you’ll get foliage and no stalks.
Water: One good drink of about an inch, once or twice a week, beats daily sprinkles. No standing water. Water early in the day so the foliage dries before evening — you’ll hold your blooms longer. Make no mistake, this is a hardy plant that endures heat and drought. Go on vacation. It’ll be fine.
Cold: Here’s where southern gardeners get into trouble. It isn’t the cold by itself that kills a tuberose — it’s cold and wet. They want to be dry through the winter. Plant them somewhere that drains, mulch over them if your winter runs into the 20s and below, or grow them in pots and pull the pots in. Zones 8–10 in the ground.
Patience: We ship these as tubers. If you plant by late spring you should see growth the same summer, but you may not see blooms until the following July. Sometimes a tuber wants a full year in the ground before it shows you anything. That’s normal. Don’t dig it up to check on it.
Where to Put It
The foliage runs about a foot tall and makes a good border in its own right. Then about mid-July, suddenly there’s a stalk two to three feet high with a row of blooms marching up it.
I want to stress how much it matters to plant the tuberose somewhere you’ll actually be. Along a walkway. Next to the patio. By the mailbox. Around a pool, which is where I first met them. In pots you can move to wherever you’re sitting that week, or carry indoors for a centerpiece. A tuberose planted at the back of the yard is a tuberose mostly wasted.
They work great in pots — but they multiply quickly, so plant fewer than you think. Crowd them and they won’t bloom well.
Cutting Them
If you want the fragrance indoors, cut the top of the shoot — the one holding a dozen or more buds — when at least two of them have already opened. The rest will open slowly over the next few days on your table. Cutting also encourages the plant to send up more.
Five hundred years of people have done exactly this. It’s a good tradition to keep.
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