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Rose of Sharon

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This is a picture of our 4 year old Rose of Sharon tree. It’s absolutely packed with flower buds this year. It has more flowers this year than it ever has. It started blooming on Wednesday or Thursday of last week, and I expect that it will continue blooming for another three or four weeks.

The Rose of Sharon shrub is a member of the Hibiscus family. You might find it listed as Shrub althaea or Hibiscus syriacus.

The shrub can be trained into tree form by careful pruning. I prune mine in early spring. Rose of sharon can reach heights of between 6 – 10 feet or more. Mine is approximately 6 feet tall right now. It’s mother tree is in my neighbors yard and that tree is at least 10 feet tall.

The flowers are two to four inches in diameter, and they can be single, double, or semi-double. Rose of Sharon tend to bloom in late summer. Mine and my neighbors have bloomed as late as the beginning of August and as early as the second week of July. I assume that the gardening zone, harshness of the past winter, seasonal care, and the summer temperatures are all factors in when exactly this lovely tree blooms. Flower colors include white, pink, red, blue and violet bicolors.

The foliage can range from light to medium green in color. Some varieties have variegated leaves.

This shrub does well in Zone 6 and higher, but gardeners in Zone 5 areas might have success if they are willing to give the tree good winter protection. This tree seems to prefer full sun, but listings state that it will also tolerate partial shade. Mine is in full sun and you can see the beautiful results in the photo above. Well draining soil is a must.

As stated above this shrub can be trained to tree form with careful pruning. It can be used in hard to plant, narrow areas, plant in hedges, as screens, or as specimen plants. Young plants will need winter protection in cool areas.

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Garden evolution part II

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An excerpt from my Gardenweb members page from the year 2002. This passage details how we landscaped the backyard.:

” Well, it’s spring 2002 and we’ve been working on landscaping our front and backyard gardens since early April. We widened and added several garden beds to the gardens. We decided to create raised beds- which unfortunately involved moving and replanting many of the 400 or so spring bulbs that I planted last November! LOL Most appear to have survived the move.

In April we purchased 272 easy-wall garden stones. We chose the red/orange colour which really seems to be a pinkish colour. After planning out the layout of the garden beds we dug out trenches where the easy-wall stones were to be placed and filled in the trenches with screening to provide a solid well draining surface for the stones to sit on. Then we began the creation of our two layered walls. We decided to have our raised garden beds run along the edges of our very small backyard (approx 100 feet long by 17 feet wide). The beds along the long sides are three feet deep, and the bed along the back of the garden is 4 feet deep.

We put in a patio that is approx 10 feet X 10 feet and laid it with red/savanah cobblestone patio stones (4 placed together form a large circle pattern). Along the side are of the patio we have a two foot wide flower bed, and at the side of the patio that borders on the rest of the backyard we built a long oval shaped 3 foot wide flower bed. The flower beds that border the patio will contain plants that grow to 3 or 4 feet in height. This will hopefully create a sort of garden room that gives us some privacy from our neighbours yet allows us to enjoy the rest of the garden while sitting at our patio table.

I purchased several perennial plants from Botanus.com (60 plants or so) and spent March to April growing more perennials, annuals and veggie seedlings indoors. It’s been a cool spring so some of my seedling planting has been delayed. However it’s been warming up nicely in the past week (May 27 to 31, 2002) so I hope to get the rest of my seedlings planted this weekend.

My garden will be a little bit unconventional. I’m planting several wild flowers, roses, and heirloom plants, but I’m mixing them with vegetables in several areas. It’s my hope that the veggies and their colours compliment the garden and don’t look too out of place mixed amongst the flowers and herbs. I really didn’t want to have a separate section of the garden just for the veggies as I felt that would break up the overall look I’m trying to achieve. If it doesn’t work perhaps I’ll go more traditional next year. ”

I’ve planted many more plants since the garden was started. Please see my “What’s Growing” page to see a list of the many many plants that I grow. It’s been a fun journey and along the way I’ve discovered that I do indeed have a very green thumb.

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