Background Gardenia jasminoides is a species of Chinese medicinal plant, which has high medicinal and economic value and rich genetic diversity, but the study on its genetic diversity is far not enough. Methods In this study, one wild and one cultivated gardenia materials were resequenced using Illumina HiSeq sequencing platform and the data were evaluated to understand the genomic characteristics of G. jasminoide s. Results After data analysis, the results showed that clean data of 11.77G, Q30 reached 90.96%. The average comparison rate between the sample and reference genome was 96.08%, the average coverage depth was 15X, and the genome coverage was 85.93%. The SNPs of FD and YP1 were identified, and 3,087,176 and 3,241,416 SNPs were developed, respectively. In addition, SNP non-synonymous mutation, InDel mutation, SV mutation and CNV mutation were also detected between the sample and the reference genome, and KEGG, GO and COG database annotations were made for genes with DNA level variation. The structural gene variation in the biosynthetic pathway of crocin and gardenia, the main medicinal substance of G. jasminoides was further explored, which provided basic data for molecular breeding and genetic diversity of G. jasminoide s in the future.