Look at the list below and you will get an inkling of how many other gingers there are that are not in the garden trade. As I have studied gingers, this list has really grown. Many of these are not very cold hardy, the exception being the little northern ginger Roscoea, hardy to zone 5 and some Cautleyas. As gingers are becoming more and more popular, the following genera are beginning to be found in retail nurseries and mail order catalogs:
Amomum - for its spicy fragrance and easy ground cover.
Boesenbergia - another nice ground cover for the shade.
Burbidgea - interesting flowers.
Etlingera - for frost-free areas, some of the most beautiful flowers in nature.
Monocostus - popular little shade plant.
Siphonochilus - very showy flowers.
Stahlianthus - used like small Curcumas
Tapeinochilos - beautiful flowers for frost-free areas
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 pages for the following genera of "other gingers":
(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.
Roscoea, hardy to zone 5 and some Cautleyas. As gingers are becoming more and more popular, the following genera are beginning to be found in retail nurseries and mail order catalogs: