📷 Crepe Jasmine — India · 08 Sept 2026
A photograph and a story, every morning
Crepe Jasmine
India · nature
A five-petalled white crepe jasmine flower opens against deep green foliage, a small cluster of pale green buds waiting on the stem to either side.
Crepe jasmine — Tabernaemontana divaricata, sometimes called pinwheel flower — is not true jasmine, but the resemblance is close enough that the name has stuck across most of the subcontinent. The flowers are smaller and a little waxier than true jasmine, with five petals that turn slightly in a windmill curl as they open. They produce no real fragrance, which is the only thing that gives them away. True jasmine fills a courtyard; crepe jasmine fills it only with light.
This bush was carrying a single open flower and perhaps eight or nine buds at various stages of unfurling. I shot close, with the flower placed slightly off-centre and the buds running off to either side in a soft diagonal. The petals had that characteristic spiral twist where they meet the calyx. The leaves behind, dark and slightly glossy, did the work of dropping the flower forward in the frame. Crepe jasmine is one of those plants that is always there in the corner of an Indian garden, almost never the centrepiece, and almost always somebody's favourite anyway.