Oleander plants are wonderfully fragrant, flowering shrubs and are native trees to Turkey that have been useful garden selections for many centuries. Historical wall paintings of oleander flowers from the volcanic ruins of the Roman City, Pompeii, have been uncovered that reveal landscape plantings of oleander trees. In Spain the pink, wild, oleander shrubs can be observed to be growing as a naturally adapted plant when tourists drive across the vast uninhabited plains between Madrid to Barcelona. The beautiful, rounded, button-shaped flowers are massed in baseball sized clusters of blooms, The most common oleander plant flower colors are pink, white and red, and the red “Firestarter” oleander shrub is the most cold hardy, documented to grow even in USDA climate zone, 7b. Buy the red, “Firestarter” oleander shrub at tytyga.com. Other rare oleander flower colors are yellow, purple and apricot, and the apricot oleander shrub is a dwarf plant only growing to about 4 to 6 feet tall. The oleander plant begins profusely flowering in the spring that lasts deep into the fall. In the United States the oleander shrub can be grown into small trees, if the bottom growing limbs are continuously removed. Reports have been made on the internet that 25 foot tall trees exist on some of the older, oleander cultivar plants. In Europe it is not unusual to see very large oleander trees, with a trunk diameter of a foot or more growing at the base of castles and forts that are documented to be hundreds of years old.

The oleander plant is considered to be cold hardy in the USDA zones 8 to 10, except for the red, “Firestarter” oleander tree with upper ground growth that will survive in zone 7b. Oleander shrubs have survived in Knoxville, TN., winters, with ,'above-ground-stem-parts' ,frozen, but rapid shoot growth from roots recovers in the spring. Many Northern State oleander plants are grown very successfully as potted house flowering plants outside in the spring and summer, then during the fall the plants are grown inside the house during the winter. The tubular root system of the oleander tree is extremely aggressive growing and should not be planted near the house or near a sewer line.

Oleander plants are an excellent flowering shrub or tree with uses that have a multitude of advantages: the oleander shrub will tolerate very high (alkaline) pH, but prefers to grow in acidic soils. Oleanders will tolerate extreme limb pruning, exposure to full sun, drought resistance, and oleander is one of the most outstanding salt water tolerant plants to grow near the seashore, even on sand dunes where they firm up the soil with their aggressive root system.

In the Western cities of San Diego, California, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Tucson, Arizona, and Phoenix, oleander shrubs are lined out in dense rows on Interstate highways to reduce wind and noise and to flower 9 months out of the year. In the Southern Gulf coastal and Atlantic States, the oleander plants are considered excellent choices for beach plantings, at Galveston, Texas, where they grow into huge privacy screens and at Savannah, and St. Simon Island Georgia the oleander shrubs are valuable in protecting cottages during hurricane season. Very old plantings of oleander trees are found flowering at Charleston , South Carolina throughout the residential and urban areas of the old colonial city.

Oleander trees fit into one of those plant categories that you can, “Love them or Hate them.” Some gardeners hate the oleander and claim that it is a “too fast” growing plant that is too aggressive. Other gardeners say that the plant is poisonous, but so are flowering Azalea bushes, the Angel Trumpet plant and the Tobacco plant, Nicotiana tobacum, that contains nicotine that is a very poisonous organic compound that frequently inhaled into the lungs by millions of smokers. It is true that all parts of the oleander tree are toxic, even smoke from a burning plant, just like poison ivy. The sap is poisonous to eat, and some sensitive people experience skin rashes when pruning the plant or by intimate contact with the stems or other parts. Good advice would be to distance oleanders from children or pets, and to enjoy oleander trees as a privacy screen and the beautiful aromatic flowers.