double-blush

Hibiscus syricacus, with one day's worth of bloom drop (15)

     being (kinda) retired allows one to do all sorts of stuff that he/she didn't have the time to do before. it's so cool, you know? now, for example, i can take my time when there's household stuff to be fixed/maintained, which goes a long way toward stress-free living..........

     a week ago, the 'double-blush' althaea (Hibisucs syriacus, aka "Rose of Sharon") over the back deck started throwing its blooms.....which of course it does every year at this time............yeah, literally throwing blooms -- spent blooms -- onto the deck...... ..in times past, it never even occurred to me to pick them off of the deck and toss them into the garden below..........spent althaea blooms, you see, quickly morph into slime balls, finally melting onto the decking and drying as if they were painted onto it............in such condition, they can't swept off, or even brushed off..........they'd have to be scraped off -- not with a mere butter knife, but more like a paint scraper..............................ugh.........well, in days past, i'd just let 'em melt.....and so thickly did they cover the northeastern corner of the deck that they melted en masse into one giant, gooey glob that gradually mildewed into one giant blackish stain, much of which still persists today......................

     this 2010 althaea bloom season has gone differently..........now, i have the time to actually pluck each fallen/spent bloom off of the deck, and toss it down as mulch for both the althaea and the adjacent camelia.......................... i've been at it daily for a week now, and guess what? althaeas put out a lot of blooms, ya'll..............i've picked up an average of 15 spent blooms per day...................and only half of the althaea hangs over the deck!  think on this, children: 15 blooms per day = 105 blooms per week..........but that's only from half the tree; so multiply by 2 and you get 210 spent blooms per week.................whoa...................and our althaea blooms at a heavy rare for at least 10 weeks per year........

     picking up a spent althaea bloom is like picking up a tuft of cotton candy.........lighter than a feather, and tacky to the touch.........makes you wanna eat 'em.

     lydia and i call this particular althaea cultivar, which i haven't found a  "real" name for yet, 'double-blush' because it makes carnation-like, double-petaled blooms that are very pale pink in color. we got it from my mom, who had planted it as a "passalong" many many years ago in ville platte............we planted ours probably 15 years ago...................................

     althaeas are 8-12' shrubs imported to the u.s. many years ago. in her fine, thoroughly researched book, The New Orleans Garden (1990), charlotte seidenberg mentions the first actual documentation that althaeas were being grown in new orleans came in 1820; but she believes that they've been grown there for much longer than that; way back in the colonial period (1720-1803). in his equally outstanding 1987 book, Southern Plants, neil odenwald writes, "Because of easy culture and few pests, many old plants [althaeas] exist." and this is certainly true..........................i can remember seeing althaeas growing around farm houses and old "ma-ma" houses from the 1950s thru present here in acadiana.

     i guess the one most commonly grown around here is the white, single-flowered one.............another common one sports blue flowers with dark maroonish centers.................less commonly, you see purple ones, rose-pink ones, purple ones............and then there's the double pink-blush one.....the creme de la creme.............................................................................

     did ya'll know that the entire hibiscus family is a slimy lot? yep, pretty much all of 'em............muscilangenous blood............most evident in okra, a favorite hibiscus species here in the south......well, my favorite, anyway.

     all of this reminds me of a favorite 'gardening for wildlife story'...........a real lesson, actually. back when we were selling native plants, we began growing native/wild hibiscus in our ditch..........to our dismay, we soon realized that some kind of small worm was completely skelatonizing the leaves of these plants....whoa.....why sell a plant species destined for ugliness in the garden, you know? then, one fine day i'm talking to old friend and bird ecologist wylie barrow, and he mentioned that they were doing bird counts over in the atchafalaya basin and that he had noted parent prothonotary warblers plucking tiny moth larvae off of wild hibiscus leaves and feeding them to their young...................double-whoa. that really drove home the point that, in wildlife gardening what looks unappealing to the gardener may not be unappealing to local wildlife; and in fact -- probably more often than not -- might actually be more appealing to wildlife.................................................with the hibiscus/worm incident, this truism became overwhelmingly apparent to me, as we had prothonotary warblers nesting in our backyard (they still are) as wylie was relaying this information to me..............................................