GENUS ALPINIA

Alpinias are upright plants that range widely in height from about a foot to as high as 12 feet. Flowers are multi-colored, usually white with red or pink hi-lights. The flowers do not have the sweet fragrance of some other gingers, but the foliage is fragrant on many Alpinias. Most are root hardy to zone 8, but most bloom on old growth, so they will not bloom except in frost-free areas. Most of them like part sun and many thrive in full sun.

Clicking on the name of the plant in the table below will open a page with notes and images for some of these plants. I plan to build up the image library over the coming months. A dollar sign ($) before the name indicates that this ginger is in cultivation and is available for sale. Click on the name to find out where.

Michel Porcher is building a database of multi-lingual common names to cross reference against the botanical names. He has completed the page for Alpinia, which can be seen at http://gmr.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/Plantnames/Sorting/Alpinia.html (Michel H. Porcher et al. 1995 - 2001, Searchable World Wide Web Multilingual Multiscript Plant Name Database (M.M.P.N.D.). Landcare Systems Research Laboratory, Department of Crop Production, Institute of Land and Food Resources, The University of Melbourne, Australia.)

The zones listed are the USDA minimum hardiness zones, as far as I could determine from the information available on the web and in catalogs.

Since there are no universal definitions of sun and shade levels, I adopted the following terms:
full sun = 6 or more hours of direct sunlight per day
part sun = 4-5 hours of direct sunlight per day
part shade = 2-3 hours of direct sunlight per day
shade = 1 or less hours direct sun, or open shade, or dappled shade filtered through a canopy of trees
Most gingers will not thrive in deep, dense, dark shade, including those that are listed for shade.