The coffee and gardenia family
Rubiaceae is the fourth largest family of flowering plants and the one with the widest gap between what it is famous for and what a florist sees of it. It gave the world coffee and quinine, and it gave the flower trade two of the most difficult and most beautiful stems in the cooler.
around 600 genera
somewhere near 13,500 species
Worldwide, overwhelmingly tropical and subtropical
This family has a diagnostic character that almost nothing else shares, and once you have seen it you cannot stop seeing it. The leaves come in opposite pairs, and between the base of each pair sits a stipule, a small flap of tissue. In Rubiaceae those stipules meet and fuse across the stem from both sides, so instead of two flaps there is a continuous collar or ring encircling the stem at every node.
Botanists call them interpetiolar stipules, and they are the reason a member of this family can usually be placed from a leafy stem with no flower on it at all. In some genera the collar is a papery sheath, in others it is reduced to a fringe of bristles, but the ring is there.
Above it the flowers are built on a fused tube opening into four or five lobes, usually in tight clusters, and the ovary sits below the flower rather than inside it. That inferior ovary is why so many members of the family produce a berry, which matters more than it sounds: one of those berries is a coffee cherry.
The family name comes from Rubia, madder, whose roots yield a strong red dye that colored European cloth and British army coats for centuries before synthetic alizarin replaced it. Rubia is Latin for red. So the family named after a red dye is best known for a white flower and a brown drink.
Coffee is Coffea, a shrub from the Ethiopian highlands and the second most traded commodity on earth by some measures. Quinine comes from the bark of Cinchona, a South American tree, and it was the first effective treatment for malaria, which is a large part of why tonic water tastes the way it does. Ixora, pentas and the sticky cleavers that catch on a dog are all in here too.
The link is worth knowing rather than being trivia. The tropical woody shrubs of this family share a habit: glossy evergreen leaves, thick textured flowers and a strong preference for warmth and humidity. That is precisely why the two cut members below are as demanding as they are.
A gardenia bruises from being handled. The petals are thick and waxy and look robust, but the tissue marks brown wherever a finger presses it, and the mark does not develop for a few hours, so the damage is done long before anyone sees it. Handle the bloom by its calyx or its leaves only. Corsage work on gardenias is done with the fingertips barely involved, and some florists use gloves for nothing else.
The whiteness is temporary by design. A gardenia opens pure white and ages to cream and then to yellow as a normal part of its life, which is not a fault and is not a sign of poor handling. Judge freshness by the firmness of the petals and the absence of brown marking, not by color alone.
The scent is the reason anyone puts up with all this. It is one of the half dozen most important flower notes in perfumery, and it cannot be extracted from the flower economically, so nearly every gardenia perfume in existence is reconstructed from other materials.
Bouvardia is the other member of this family in the cooler, and its reputation for giving up has a structural cause worth understanding rather than just working around. This is a family of fine stemmed tropical shrubs. A fine stem carries a narrow water column, a narrow column breaks easily once air gets into it, and a stem that thin cannot generate enough pull to push the air back out. The same build that makes bouvardia fragile in water is what makes it valuable in the hand, because nothing else offers that scale of flower on a stem that fine.
It is also ethylene sensitive, as is gardenia, which is a family tendency worth generalizing from. Both should be kept clear of ripening fruit, engine exhaust and any flower that is going over in the same cooler. Good growers treat bouvardia before shipping and it is a fair question to ask a supplier.
The name honors Charles Bouvard, who ran the royal garden in Paris in the seventeenth century, which places it among the many flowers carrying the name of a physician rather than a botanist.
