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Help my Jasmines Dying!!


Question
My father purchased a Jasmine tree in August and since then has lost all her leaves. I've put miracle grow sticks but she hasn't grown back any leaves. i dont' know what to do and its indoors as I am in Montreal and it's starting to get colder outside. Please help I've never grown a Jasmine tree before. It's about 4 feet tall, please help.

Answer
Jasmine is one of those intoxicating scents that send brain cells into shock.  I too love this plant.  Let's see what we have here and what we can do.

First, if there is some way to find out a better identification of this plant, it will help us understand what may have gone wrong.  We have to know as much as possible about the plants we grow, starting with WHAT they are.  There are many, many Jasmines, very different from one another, some fragrance-free, some yellow and others white, some growing fast and others slow.  Do you have a NAME of this Jasmine on a label somewhere?  A tag that came with this plant?  Jasminum Sambac?  Maid of Orleans?  Check.

You are calling this a 4 foot 'tree'.  How big in inches is the pot?  Jasmines grow generally as Vines, not Trees.  Peotic license or is this a Tree?  Perhaps this is not a Jasminum, but a Night-blooming Jasmine or other plant?  What kind of light are you giving it?

Miracle Gro is not a good way to stimulate leaf growth in a plant that is losing its leaves.  For future reference, so you know.  Leaves drop off a plant because the plant is in trouble -- in this case, I suspect the Humidity was very low, and the plant had been growing in a Greenhouse environment with a very high Humidity.  You'd lose leaves too if you had to go through that.

Another reason plants lose their leaves is root damage, often due to over-watering.  Most people are so happy to get a plant that they pay constant attention to it.  The one thing they think of is to water it over and over, the way you would feed ducks at the duck pond.  Roots begin to get soggy, the soil runs out of Oxygen, cells die, the plant drowns and loses its leaves.  That is what I think happened here.  Too much water.  What think you?

True Jasmines bloom at certain temperatures that happen to be on the cool side -- in the 50's (Fahrenheit).  Day length and temperature determine whether it will be setting buds.

A dose of Miracle Gro for flowering plants MIGHT be helpful when it's time to set buds.  But not before then.  Tell me, do you see any growth from dormant axils?  What is the state of the plant right now?   Today?  

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