Wild Gardenia

With its glossy, dark green leaves and large, trumpet-shaped white flowers, it's easy to mistake the Wild Gardenia for the cultivated gardenias sold at a garden centre — except this one's the indigenous original, blooming freely in South African forests long before anyone thought to plant a gardenia hedge. Its bark tells its own story with age, starting out smooth and pale grey-brown, then cracking into segments that look uncannily like crocodile skin. Look closely at the leaves, too, and you might spot tiny raised bumps along the veins — small shelters called domatia that house beneficial mites, quietly helping to keep the tree healthy.

The flowers themselves are a fleeting spectacle. Each one opens alone at a branch tip, lasts only a couple of days, and is deeply, sweetly scented — a fragrance so persistent it lingers even in flowers that have been picked and dried. Cream-white on the outside, they carry maroon streaks inside the throat that act as landing guides for moths and other pollinators. By late summer, those flowers give way to hard green fruit that slowly ripens to brown and can hang on the tree for months. It's technically edible, if unremarkable to a human palate — but baboons and vervet and samango monkeys clearly feel differently, descending on a fruiting tree with real enthusiasm (several of the tree's Afrikaans and indigenous names literally translate to "ape food"). Bushpigs, bushbuck, and grey duiker take care of whatever falls to the forest floor.

The wood has long earned its keep, too — hard and pliable enough to carve into cooking spoons, porridge sticks, and tool handles, and good, hot-burning firewood besides. In traditional medicine, powdered root has been used for rheumatism and leprosy, while warmed fruit juice was applied to wounds and burns. The tree even has a footnote in botanical history: it was among the South African species collected and shipped to Kew Gardens in London in the 1770s, decades before it was formally named after Swedish botanist Göran Rothman.