What does a tea olive tree smell like?

The Tea Olive's incredibly delectable scent is unmatched by any other bringing in a natural perfume smell to your garden/landscape.

Do tea olive trees produce fruit?

Tea Olive trees do not grow any edible fruit, but they are great fragrant ornamental trees.

Fragrant Tea Olive Tree

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Product Description

The Fragrant Tea Olive Tree is an excellent choice to sweeten up your garden with its incredibly delectable scent and soft white blossoms! The sweet olive tree may attract butterflies with the sweet scent.

The lush, green foliage of the Tea Olive shrub has pale undersides and is accompanied by a multitude of small, extremely sweet smelling white flowers. The fragrant blooms begin in early fall around October and last until early spring. The tiny creamy white tea olive blooms will perfume the entire landscape.

Since the fragrant flowers are not noticeably showy, visitors in your garden or landscape will wonder where the delightful fragrance is coming from. They will get their answer as soon as they pass this dense evergreen shrub with dark green leaves that keep their color all year long.

With its upright oval, columnar growth habit the sweet osmanthus tea olive bush is ideal for use as a fragrant specimen plant, privacy hedge, or can be trained to grow as a small tree. The sweet Tea Olive Tree should be placed where its delightful fragrance can be enjoyed. We enjoy seeing it as a border hedge in multiple foundation plantings.

Tea Olive Tree Care

This evergreen fragrant tea olive plant prefers full sun to partial shade and is drought tolerant once established.

The sweet tea olive plant grows up to 15 to 30 feet tall and 15-20 feet wide at maturity and prefers well drained, acidic soil types. It can tolerate a wide variety of growing conditions such as clay, loamy, or sandy soils. The nutrient and water schedule for this plant is super easy!

This sweet olive bush is a great choice, even for some cold hardy climates and it is very long lived! Great for southern gardens as the tea olive osmanthus fragrans grow in hardiness zones 8-11 across the United States.

The fragrant tea olive shrub growth rate is up to 12 inches per year. If you are looking to create a tea olive hedge for privacy, space these evergreen trees approximately 5-10 feet apart.

Information on planting this tea olive shrub is as follows. Make sure your plant arrived healthily. Dig a hole the size of the root ball. Place the plant into the hole up until the trunk. Backfill with soil until filled and firmly compress the soil.

Water the fragrant olive tree regularly the first year of planting to establish a strong root system and keep healthy white blooms. Apply a complete fertilizer with slow release nitrogen yearly. It is pest and disease resistant.

Enjoy the fragrant sweet olive plants through the spring or fall growing season, no matter what time of year.

Shop the Fragrant Tea Olive tree for sale and other flowering shrubs & hedges for sale.

Botanical Name

Osmanthus fragrans

Sunlight Full Sun / Partial Shade

Flower Color White

Foliage Color Green

Mature Height 15-30 ft

Mature Width 15-20 ft

Growing Zones 8, 9, 10, 11

Special Features

Fragrant
Drought tolerant
Upright growth habit
Evergreen

Shipping Info

Once your Fragrant Tea Olive Tree order is placed, we will ship your plant(s) within seven business days year round unless during the checkout process you request otherwise in the space provided to do so.

Perfect Plants’ shipping specialists carefully package your plants using a proven packaging method that ensures your plants arrive healthy, colorfully alive and ready to flourish. We’ve coined the term ‘upside down box test’ and we do just that; we carefully package so that regardless of the direction your box is handled, it will not harm your precious plant that’s inside.

No shipping process is without a problem from time to time. On rare occasions some plants may experience some of the following during their transit: drooping, minor leaf-loss and/or minimal yellowing/discoloration, minor limb damage, etc. These instances are quite rare, but can happen when shipping plants in boxes.

Plants normally recover within a few weeks after planting. If a damaged box has injured your plant on the inside, please notify us within 5 days of receiving you package(s) by emailing us a photograph of the damage.

We always do our very best to ensure that your plants are packed and shipped in the safest, gentlest and most effective way possible.

Will my plants and trees look like the photographs?

Absolutely! Unlike other online nurseries, our photos are of actual plants and trees we’ve grown here, on our family operated nursery.

Growing our own plants and trees helps to ensure we ship you the best quality plants that are free of pests and diseases.

Your plants and trees may however not ship with flowers on them, like the photographs. This all depends on the time of year you buy your plant or tree. Crape Myrtle trees, for example, only bloom during the summer months, so if you purchase one during the spring or fall, they would ship without flowers. Once planted, your plants will grow and thrive giving you flowers for many years to come!

Pot Sizes

Pot sizes (commonly referred to in gallons) are shipped in the same size nursery trade pots which may vary in actual volume. Some plants may have been at the approximate pot size listed, but require excess dirt to be removed so that you will not be paying any additional shipping costs. This doesn’t happen very often though.

Shipping Fees

Our shipping charges are based on the value of your order. Please use the chart below to see what your shipping charge will be.

Care

TEA OLIVE CARE:

The Tea Olive prefers full sun or partial shade. Too much shade will lead to a less dense growth. They tolerate most soil types including clays, but ideally need good drainage. They are fairly drought tolerant once established, but should receive regular water until then.

The Tea Olive should be pruned selectively, removing growing tips to maintain a bushy, compact size. They should not be sheared or severely pruned. Lower lateral branches can be removed to create a small, multi-trunked tree.

Their centers should be planted 4 to 6 feet apart to form a screen or hedge.

PLANTING INSTRUCTIONS:

Dig a hole approximately twice as wide as your new plant’s root ball and deep enough so that the top of the root ball is equal with the ground level.

Loosen the root ball using a small garden spade or by hand. Breaking smaller outer roots can encourage growth into the new soil, but take care to not damage large primary roots.

Place the plant in the hole and ensure that it is situated evenly upright. Use the excavated soil to fill in around the root ball, using your foot to pack it in firmly. Thoroughly soak with a hose as you fill in the dirt. Take great care to not leave any gaps or air spaces around the root ball as this could kill the plant.

A 2-4 inch layer of mulch is strongly recommended to help retain moisture and discourage weed growth. Apply mulch over the entire planting area but keep away from the stems or trunk by a few inches. Ensure that the plant and surrounding soil is completely soaked with water.

To ensure the proper nutrients are available for the life of your Tea Olive, our proprietary Perfect Plants Special Blend Soil and a once yearly application of Nutricote Total 360 Fertilizer are great considerations for your new plants!

9 reviews for Fragrant Tea Olive Tree

5 star		88%
4 star		0%
3 star		11%
2 star		0%
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Rated 3 out of 5
Livia – April 13, 2016
Smells so beautiful. Arrived in excellent condition.
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Rated 5 out of 5
Rose Kemper – May 14, 2016
First time online plant shopper, so was hesitate to buy plants online. The ‘About Us’ page really sold me on Perfect Plants. Bought 4 3gallons and was very happy. They came in two boxes shipped via Fedex, nicely packaged. Thanks!
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Rated 5 out of 5
Glenda Elkhan – June 7, 2017
Another first time online plant shopper here. You would be amazed at how well these plants are packaged. Arrived in great condition. I wanted to make sure my Tea Olive did the best possible, so I bought the add-on soil and fertilizer, which both came with printed instructions on how to use.
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Rated 5 out of 5
Nikki Scott – January 29, 2018
Bought in January as a gift and the #1 gallon Tea Olive I bought had 3 blooms. Very happy with this gift purchase.
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Rated 5 out of 5
Manny Garcia (store manager) – January 18, 2019
The smell is tantalizing.. I can smell it from a few feet away and when it’s breezy. So glad I decided to plant this near my door so I can always catch a whiff of the lovely fragrance of the tea olive.
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Rated 5 out of 5
Craig (verified owner) – May 6, 2019
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Arrived quickly, shipped well and the plants seem to be doing well. Thank you.
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- Perfect Plants (store manager) – May 6, 2019
  Thank you for your order! The tea olive is a magical plant and we are happy yours is doing well :)
Rated 5 out of 5
Anonymous (verified owner) – June 25, 2020
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Beautiful plants. They were alive and thriving when they arrived, and have taken to the soil very well. I’ve had plenty of new growth on the bushes.
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- Perfect Plants (store manager) – June 26, 2020
  Thank you so much for your kind words on our Tea Olive Tree. Enjoy those fragrant blooms this fall!
Rated 5 out of 5
Teresa F. (verified owner) – July 6, 2020
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I ordered my first Tea Olive Tree through Zullily which came from perfect plants. wasn’t getting to excited until I actually saw the plant. I was so pleased with it that I immediately ordered another from Perfect Plants the day I got my first one. Now I want to save the money to order a couple of Oak Leaf Hollies.
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- Perfect Plants (store manager) – July 7, 2020
  Hi Teresa, thank you so much for your support. We are happy to help out wonderful customers like you and we hope you enjoy your Tea Olive shrubs!
Rated 5 out of 5
Judy (verified owner) – July 22, 2020
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Beautiful Tea Olive which came shipped in wonderful condition and as described!
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- Perfect Plants (store manager) – July 23, 2020
  Judy, thank you for your kind words regarding our Tea Olive Tree. We are so glad it arrived to your home safe and sound. Enjoy those fragrant blooms this fall!

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