If I wanted to, I could fill the entire yard with roses of Sharon.\u00a0 So could most people, because roses of Sharon, or Hibiscus syriacus, are among the most prolific garden shrubs.\u00a0 All you need to launch a rose of Sharon world domination campaign is one small specimen anywhere on or near your property.\u00a0 If it flowers, its alluring blossoms will be pollinated by obliging insects.\u00a0 After pollination, it will produce fat green pods full of viable seeds.\u00a0 When I say \u201cviable,\u201d I mean that one hundred and ten percent of the seeds will germinate.\u00a0 The resulting seedlings will grow at lightning speed and make a priority of producing flowers of their own.\u00a0 Nature will take its course and without human intervention, the one small specimen will produce enough offspring to populate your entire property after about three years.<\/p>\n
I think of this daunting prospect as I take up my clippers, loppers and pruning saw to begin the annual task of pruning the roses of Sharon.\u00a0 Only two of the eleven specimens currently on my property were purchased by me.\u00a0 Two or three more were left by my predecessor.\u00a0 The rest were self-sown plants that proved useful and decorative on the south edge of a part of the front garden.\u00a0 This is another way of saying that I was inattentive one year and they grew to a size that made them difficult to remove.\u00a0 I made a virtue out of a necessity, pruned the interlopers into standard or tree form and let them grow.\u00a0 They have rewarded me by making extraordinary efforts every year to populate the entire surrounding area with more roses of Sharon.<\/p>\n
Roses of Sharon are nothing new on the American scene.\u00a0 They were first documented by John Custis, a relative of Martha Washington\u2019s first husband, in 1736, forty years before the Declaration of Independence.\u00a0 They have been fixtures in nursery catalogs since nursery catalogs began.\u00a0 Generations of gardeners have also passed along seeds, cuttings and young plants, as documented by southern garden historians Steve Bender and Felder Rushing in their hilarious and highly informative book, Passalong Plants.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i>My assortment of roses of Sharon is fairly typical.\u00a0 Some have single, hollyhock-like flowers in either white, pale pink or pale blue-purple, with red central \u201ceyes.\u201d\u00a0 The lower back garden is home to \u2018White Chiffon,\u2019 a deliberately purchased, double-flowered white variety.\u00a0 The upper back garden contains two double-flowered, blue-purple varieties, plus my pride and joy, \u2018Sugar Tips,\u2019 with double pink flowers and variegated foliage.\u00a0 Every single one of them is beautiful in bloom.\u00a0 The great virtue of rose of Sharon\u2014in addition to its vigor\u2014is that the bloom season is long.\u00a0 Each flower lasts only a day, but the flowers open continuously for up to six weeks.\u00a0 Pruning not only keeps the self-seeding under moderate control, but produces more floriferous shrubs.<\/p>\n
If you have roses of Sharon, you should prune them right after they flower in the late summer or early fall, or at least before cold weather sets in.\u00a0 As I write this, the seed pods on the roses of Sharon in my yard are drying and ripening, preparing to split open and disgorge all of those seeds.\u00a0 Pruning in fall means that the vast majority of those seeds will never hit the ground and that is a very good thing.\u00a0 As I have gone about the business of garden clean-up, I have uprooted scores of rose of Sharon seedlings.\u00a0 The abundance persists, despite the fact that the resident deer posse seems to find the bushes tasty.<\/p>\n
Some guidebooks advise pruning in spring.\u00a0 This is fine and will not harm nascent flower buds, but it does give the seed pods time to ripen and split.\u00a0 If time runs out in the fall, do it in spring, which is preferable to not pruning at all.\u00a0 Unpruned roses of Sharon quickly become leggy and ungainly, producing flowers only at the tops of the spindly branches.<\/p>\n
Occasionally, when I have had all I can stand of plucking unwanted seedlings, I wish that I could replace all the roses of Sharon\u2014except possibly \u2018Sugar Tips\u2019\u2014with some of the sterile or semi-sterile varieties bred at and introduced by the U.S. National Arboretum.\u00a0 Hybridized by Donald Egolf, they are named after goddesses.\u00a0 \u2018Diana\u2019 features white flowers, \u2018Aphrodite\u2019 bears rose-pink blooms with red eyes and \u2018Helene\u2019 boasts white flowers and red eyes.\u00a0 \u2018Minerva\u2019 is similar to \u2018Aphrodite,\u2019 but the petals are more ruffled.\u00a0\u00a0 It is worth seeking out these less-seedy varieties to ease your garden labors.<\/p>\n
Even the goddesses need pruning, of course, but there is less urgency in the fall.\u00a0 Whenever you do the chore, lop off any dead or weak branches, and trim the rest back by about one third.\u00a0 Overgrown shrubs should receive a more severe haircut, with two thirds of the growth removed.\u00a0 When spring rolls around, don\u2019t worry that you have killed your rose of Sharon.\u00a0 They are simply among the last shrubs in the garden to leaf out.\u00a0 Rest assured that neither you, nor Mr. Antlers, nor an invading army can stop them.<\/p>\n
Local nurseries usually carry roses of Sharon in the spring.\u00a0 To obtain National Arboretum introductions and other varieties, try Greenwood Nursery, 636 Myers Cove Road, McMinnville, TN 37110, http:\/\/www.greenwoodnursery.com<\/a>, (800) 426-0958.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If I wanted to, I could fill the entire yard with roses of Sharon.\u00a0 So could most people, because roses of Sharon, or Hibiscus syriacus, are among the most prolific garden shrubs.\u00a0 All you need to launch a rose of Sharon world domination campaign is one small specimen anywhere on or near your property.\u00a0 If … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[1007,412,491,1008,1006,1009,457,41],"class_list":["post-1195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-sugar-tips","tag-fall-garden-chores","tag-flowering-shrubs","tag-grandmothers-garden","tag-hibiscus-syriacus","tag-old-fashioned-shrubs","tag-rose-of-sharon","tag-self-seeding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1196,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions\/1196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}