🌼 Conger Yellow Tea Olive

Osmanthus fragrans ‘Conger Yellow’
The butter-yellow tea olive: soft yellow flowers, sweet perfume, and a colour between white and orange.
Sun
Full sun to part shade
Mature size
10–12 ft tall and wide
Spacing
10–12 ft apart
Soil pH
6.0–7.5
Zones
Zones 8–11; a genuine Florida shrub, happiest statewide except in hard-freeze pockets

What it looks like

Osmanthus fragrans 'Conger Yellow' (species) — Osmanthus Fragrans chinese Guihua
Osmanthus fragrans, the species (no verified photo of 'Conger Yellow' itself exists). Photo: Gargarean, Public domain.
Osmanthus fragrans 'Conger Yellow' (species) — Osmanthus fragrans (orange flowers)
Osmanthus fragrans, the species (no verified photo of 'Conger Yellow' itself exists). Photo: Laitr Keiows, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Osmanthus fragrans 'Conger Yellow' (species) — Osmanthus fragrans ZH 09
Osmanthus fragrans, the species (no verified photo of 'Conger Yellow' itself exists). Photo: Love Krittaya, Public domain.

Why this variety

Conger Yellow is the butter-yellow tea olive: flowers in a soft, buttery yellow — paler than Aurantiacus’s orange, warmer than Fudingzhu’s cream — opening in fall with the family’s signature perfume, on an evergreen shrub 10–12 feet tall and wide. It is the tea olive for a garden that wants a visible flower colour without the shout of orange: yellow reads clearly against dark green leaves, photographs beautifully, and pairs with both white and pink neighbours without clashing.

In Florida, Conger Yellow is at home statewide except in hard-freeze pockets, in sun to part shade and well-drained soil, with the same easy care as the species. Give it room, prune after a flush of bloom if shaping is needed, and plant it where the yellow will be seen — by a path, near a window, or against a dark hedge that makes the butter-yellow pop.

How to grow

Tea olive is the shrub you plant for a smell, not a sight: tiny white, cream, yellow or orange flowers, almost invisible among the leaves, with a fragrance — apricot, jasmine, orange blossom, depending on whose nose you ask — that carries across a whole yard in fall and winter, with scattered bloom through the cooler months. Plant in spring or fall in sun to part shade in well-drained soil, and give it room: 10–15 feet tall and wide at maturity, though it takes pruning gracefully. In Florida it is a plant-it-and-enjoy-it shrub, evergreen, heat-tolerant and long-lived, and one of the few shrubs that is at its best when the rest of the garden is winding down. Prune after a flush of bloom if shaping is needed; tea olive forgives a haircut better than most evergreens.

Water & feeding

Water deeply through establishment, then in dry spells; established tea olive is moderately drought-tolerant but blooms best with steady moisture. Mulch to hold moisture. Feed lightly in spring.

Common problems

Few serious pests. Scale may appear on stressed plants; horticultural oil and better watering usually settle them. Cold damage in a hard freeze is the real risk in north Florida — wait until spring growth shows, then prune back to live wood. A tea olive planted in wet, shady clay will grow slowly and bloom thinly; that is a siting verdict.

Harvest

No fruit harvest — the crop is the yellow flush and the perfume. Prune after flowering if shaping is needed. The yellow flowers hold their colour longer in the vase than white ones if you cut a few stems for indoors, though cutting them costs you fragrance in the garden, which is a trade to weigh before you snip.

Nerdy fact: Yellow in flowers usually means carotenoids or flavonols, and tea olive’s yellow forms sit in the carotenoid family — the same chemistry that makes a marigold yellow and a carrot orange. Conger Yellow is, chemically speaking, a marigold’s cousin wearing a shrub’s clothes.

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Saving seeds

Conger Yellow is a named tea olive cultivar — keep it from cuttings, not seed; seedlings won’t hold the butter-yellow flowers. The Saving seeds section of the Tea Olive guide covers seed for the straight species.