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How to grow ginger plants

Go for the root of all goodness! - by Jenny Dillon
  • 27 Nov 2020
How to grow ginger plants

Spice up your garden, literally, with ginger. Then use it to spice up your dinners... even your life!

With so many uses, it’s only natural the ginger plant is big, bold and beautiful, with long, long leaves, many with a different colour underside, and some of the flowers are simply stunning.

Most gingers are native to Asia, where it has been used a food staple for thousands of years. Hot and spicy to taste, although not as strong as chilli, its health properties include working to stimulate the heart, settle the stomach, and as a treatment for morning sickness and other types of nausea. And it tastes great in stir-fries, curries and desserts.

Beehive ginger plant

Beehive ginger

Getty

Cooking with ginger

The best cooking ginger is Zingiber officinale and you just lift up the root (a type of rhizome), split it into pieces and replant it. The leaves are a much smaller than ornamental gingers and not nearly as flamboyant. But some newer varieties come with stunning, long-lasting ‘beehive’-shaped flowering cones in apricot, yellow, orange, pink and vibrant red. There’s even a chocolate coloured variety.

The preferred ginger for Thai cooking is the lesser galangal (Alpinia officinarum). It has beautiful lush green leaves, and very pretty pink and cream, shell-like flowers.

Best gingers for your garden

Alpinia caeulea is an Australian native that grows more than two metres tall and has long slender leaves that weigh down on the stems and make them curve over. The top sides of the leaves are a soft green, but the undersides are a rich browny red with a soft, velvety touch. It produces tiny white, shell-like flowers that turn into blue berries. Both the roots and berries were used in Indigenous cooking.

The variegated shell ginger (Alpinia zerumbet variegata) is one of the more sensational looking gingers. It’s smaller than most, growing to about 1.5 metres tall and about 2 metres wide. Its cream, pink and yellow flowers hang through the foliage on long, pink racemes in spring. But it’s the leaves – long and quite broad for a ginger – the yellow and green variegation have a striking effect in your garden throughout the year.

ginger
Getty

Garden designs with ginger

While obviously ginger is a must for any tropical garden, because it thrives in warm and humid conditions, it can also add height and volume to a circular garden bed in the middle of a lawn, or as a stunning screen in front of windows where you want privacy but some light as well.

You might also like:

How to grow an apple tree

How to grow your own dragon fruit plant

11 fabulous ginger recipes

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Jenny Dillon
Jenny Dillon
Jenny Dillon is the garden editor of Better Homes and Gardens. Her passion for gardening began in her mother’s huge vegetable patch and orchard in the country and now extends to the challenge of city plots, where the constraints are countered by the delights.

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