Ornamental Ginger

Alpinia and Hedychium, the broad-leafed clumpers that fill the mid-storey with tropical lushness and the odd sweetly scented flower.

Alpinia / Hedychium species · Also known as Shell Ginger, Ginger Lily

Ornamental ginger is what people picture when they picture a lush subtropical garden: tall arching canes, big glossy paddle leaves, and a sense of green abundance that reads as holiday. The two we plant most are shell ginger (Alpinia zerumbet), grown chiefly for its foliage and its cool pendant shell-pink flowers, and the ginger lilies (Hedychium), which throw genuinely fragrant blooms in the warmer months.

A point worth making early, because clients often ask, is that these are ornamental gingers rather than the culinary ginger you cook with, so plant them for the leaf and the flower and buy your ginger from the greengrocer. They earn their spot by filling the difficult middle layer of a garden, the height between groundcover and canopy, with soft, generous greenery that softens hard edges and gives a planting real depth.

In a Brisbane garden

In our summers ornamental ginger is in its element, romping away through the warm, wet months into a dense, tropical thicket, and this is exactly the plant that makes a Brisbane garden feel like the subtropics it sits in. The trade-off to be straight about is water, because that lushness is thirsty: through a dry spell or a rain-free stretch of winter these gingers want regular deep watering, and a clump left dry will scorch at the leaf edges and look tatty rather than tropical, so they belong in a garden where you accept a higher water bill for a lush look.

They also spread, steadily and by rhizome, so we place them where a widening clump is welcome and keep them off tight boundaries where they will lean on a neighbour's fence. Cold, dry westerly wind through a Brisbane winter marks the foliage, which is why we tuck them into sheltered, part-shaded pockets rather than exposing them on a windy corner, and every couple of years the maintenance job is honest work: cutting out the spent canes and lifting and dividing the clump before it outgrows its spot.

How we design with it

We use ornamental ginger as the mid-storey backbone of a tropical garden design, the green mass that sits between a palm canopy overhead and a carpet of foliage below, giving the whole planting the layered fullness that reads as lush rather than sparse. It is one of the plants we lean on most in our guide to designing a subtropical garden in Brisbane, precisely because it delivers that abundance so quickly.

Along a fence or a blank rendered wall, a run of shell ginger softens the line and buys a screen of soft green in a season or two, and near a path or a window we favour the fragrant Hedychiums so the scent is where you'll actually meet it on a summer evening. Because they want moisture and shelter, we group them with other thirsty lush plants rather than scattering them through a dry, exposed bed where they'd be the one struggling.

Where we write about ornamental ginger

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