Pine cone ginger is named for its pink-green pine cone shaped flowers . The flowers appear mid to late summer, start out green and turn red. Small cream colored flowers appear on the cones. The flowers come out of the ground on their own stalks separate from the leaves. Blooming time is supposed to be fall so perhaps I’ll have some flower pictures to post here soon.
Foliage is variegated. Variegated varieties reach about 4′ tall, non-variegated about 7′ tall.
This ginger is easy to grow, clumping and propagated by division. Pine cone ginger is fast growing. It prefers moist soil don’t let it go totally dry. It prefers more sun than shade as do most variegated plants.
The milky substance in the flower cones is used in many shampoos. In medieval times ginger root was so loved it was set on the table nightly as we do with salt and pepper today.
This plant dropped about half its leaves when the weather first went under 40′ and the rest of them when we had the frost earlier this month. It’ll either come back in the spring or it won’t.
This ginger did come back it has about 3 stalks now and I’m still waiting for my first bloom.
See also:Variegated Shell Ginger
5 responses so far ↓
1 admin // Jan 7, 2008 at 2:24 pm
This plant dropped all its leaves the first time it went below freezing. It’s too soon to tell if I lost it or not.
2 ljmacphee // May 7, 2008 at 10:02 pm
This plant re-appeared the first week of May. I had given up all hope, but here it is.
3 ljmacphee // Aug 25, 2008 at 12:59 pm
One of the last plants to reappear in the spring.
It has sent up new stalks, no blooms yet. I’ll likely move it out front with the other gingers in the fall.
4 marilyn stevens // Sep 7, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Am confused as the bottom photo seems to be of beehive ginger not shampoo or pinecone ginger.
This seems to be a common confusion.
5 ljmacphee // Sep 7, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Thanks!
I grabbed the bottom photo off Flickr as mine still hasn’t bloomed.
I’ll take that one down and keep waiting for mine to bloom. Perhaps soon now that fall is coming around.
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