A Hard-won Prize

 I’m not the first to observe that the best thing about plants is making more of them. I may have missed my calling. I could so easily have been a greenhouse rat, a professional plant maven. A tastemaker, a horticultural influencer. I can pretend, anyway. I grow a lot of things, and I pass them on to family and friends like a joyful gnome tossing gold coins from a treasure chest. “Here. You’ve GOT to have this plant. This is the greatest plant. It doesn’t look like much now, but come the end of July, it’s going to send out some hot pink flowers that will drive you mad with joy.”

Speaking of mad with joy...look at this beauty! 

 I have for years been enamored of a hibiscus named Creole Lady, which I ordered from Logee’s Greenhouse easily a decade ago. I’ve seen lots of nice hibiscus, and I love my glorious yellow and red "The Path," but this one, one of the Cajun hybrids, carries special voodoo magic. 

Early in the morning, her sails start to unfurl.  

Then, BAM!

In come the peachy sunset tones...it's hard to say what my favorite stage is, but this one, ohh.

 Just before closing, it goes all pale yellow and silver. Amazing. 

My decade-plus love affair with this plant has deepend into a mature "I don't want to live without you" love.

 I like its growth habit, its leaves (dark green and shiny) and its enormous flowers, six inches across, with that bewitching color-changing habit. This is the same flower, at the beginning and the end of a summer day. The progression happens faster when it's hot. 

 By the time the yellow and silver flower falls, a new bud is opening with those heady sunrise tones, and you get to do the whole swoony thing all over again. It’s a drama queen and I love it with all my heart.

 

I’ve taken many cuttings of Creole Lady over the years, and every single one of them has turned black and died. My impetus to propagate this plant is several-pronged. First, it’s the best hibiscus I’ve ever seen. Second, it’s really hard to find—there is one grower in Florida currently offering it, but he’s usually back-ordered for six months or more. Third, I can’t keep an individual hibiscus for more than five or six years, because they get too big. Like, scraping the greenhouse ceiling big. Tree big. Redwood big. 

 Fourth, my greenhouse is prone to midwinter freezes, when the gas cuts off and everything dies. I have been burned so many times that I’ve learned to keep a small Creole Lady on hand as insurance, one that I can keep in the house during cold snaps, just in case the greenhouse freezes one single-digit night (which is always when it happens). To go from a glorious tree full of coral and violet blossoms to a sad rack of limp rags is Very Hard on the Heart. But it has happened to her, and to me, several times. Such is the gas supply from our well: erratic and faulty.

 This is why I need an understudy coming along all the time. I’m completely neurotic about it, moreso with time, because Creole Lady is getting harder and harder to obtain. When Logee’s stopped carrying it, I ordered one from Winn’s Exotic Hibiscus one January, and finally received a small, spindly plant at the end of June. I had prepaid, but had to remind him that I still wanted it, and then it finally shipped. With endless love and attention, that spindly plant—grafted onto a stronger rootstock, I might add, because it’s so hard to root—is a magnificent three-year-old. And I’m already foreseeing the time when it gets too big to handle, and I will have to replace it with one whose pot I can lift.

 

You see, there has been a rolling succession of Creole Ladies in my life. What happens with hibiscus in my greenhouse, if they don't die by freezing, is that they all eventually outgrow their welcome. Last January, I finally gave up on the enormous five-year-old Lady who had been frozen down to bare sticks in a gas outage,

 slowly came back into full glory, got huge, 

then became infested last winter with small green aphids that I absolutely could not get rid of. I was spraying that plant twice a day and still it was a living green mat of aphids, infesting everything else in my tiny greenhouse. It was no longer an asset. Attached as I was, I had to get rid of it. But before I dragged her enormous pot out into the snow and kissed her goodbye, I took three small cuttings. It was January 21, 2021.

 Hastening to add that I had an understudy from Winn! or I'd never have euthanized the giant plant.

I washed the cuttings, dipped them in rooting hormone, and put them in clean wet vermiculite in a clean plastic cup. I made a humidity tent with a second clear plastic cup. I provided gentle heat from below with a five watt aquarium heater meant for bettas. The cuttings sat there for weeks, bathed in full-spectrum light from a grow lamp, doing absolutely nothing. Two turned black and died. One stayed green. But it was April 30—three full months—before a tiny white root protruded from its base. You can see the other cutting is black and rotty and dying. That's par for the course. 

 By June—five months later—the lone living one had five roots perhaps a half-inch long. I tried a couple of times to remove the top cup, to get it used to ambient humidity, and each time the leaves wilted like a damp Kleenex, giving me clear indication that it intended to die, and die soon. Back on with the humidity cup. The cutting sulked. The summer got hot and I removed the bottom heater. Still the cutting sat, doing nothing. One day in early July I was alarmed to see two of its leaves turning yellow. They fell off. The stem started turning black. Oh no!! I was desperate. Clearly what I was doing wasn’t working. Time to change things up. 

 

I removed all but one leaf, reasoning that it would lose less water through one leaf than four. I repotted it and its puny roots in real potting soil, and then I put it outside in light shade on my chipmunk-proof propagation table. It would no longer have a humidity chamber. This plant was on its own. It was now or never. And that cutting started putting out green shoots and then it made new leaves. By golly it was alive!! It was growing! I had my tiny understudy!  It had been agonizingly slow, but somehow I’d blundered through and done it.  (Three year old Creole Lady in back).

 

Now all I want to do is try again. That was fun. And I am a true masochist. 

But with good reason. LOOK AT THIS PLANT.

One Heck of a Hibiscus

Hibiscus sinensis "Creole Lady" had had a tightly furled reddish bud for about a week. I couldn't get down to the greenhouse for a day, but it was drizzly and cool and I knew things would be fine in there. Well, Lady was gettin' busy in the greenhouse. If only I'd known!! 

The next day I opened the door and walked in to find this. What is different about this picture?

It might be the huge sunset-hued flower that has opened. She'd been open for a day, and I missed it!!

I made a noise like OOP! The kind of noise you'd make when you were a little kid and the Jack-in-the-box popped out.

I never got used to that; they still scare the crap out of me. Clowns and all that.

But this was a happy OOP, a wordless expression of utter amazement, shock and awe.

How do they breed a flower like this, that looks like a Daytona sunset? How can every color I adore be combined so gracefully in a single flower? And with a red-orange stigma floating above the whole creation?

Come here. Let me look into your face.

I have completely quit using photo filters like Snapseed or any of those offered in Instagram. In my opinion, nothing can compare to what the iPhone 6 is able to see. It sees what I see, pure unadulterated beauty. You'd swear I'd messed with this, filtered it, but no. This is Hibiscus "Creole Lady," just as God and man made her. Swoon. 

For make no mistake, she is a creation of man, and man's creations can be pretty darned wonderful. 

Not sure why they call these "Cajun" hibiscus--perhaps they were first bred in Louisiana? But I love the names..."Voodoo Queen" is another one I have my eye on...She changes color from day to day! Aggh! I'd never leave the greenhouse!

I moved her closer to her big sister "The Path."

I had to leave for town in a few minutes. Man, I hated to leave that flower. I wanted to brew a cup of orange spice herbal tea, add honey, and sit down and gaze into her face, then into The Path's, then into hers, for a couple of hours. I wanted to write poems about hibiscus flowers. I wanted to do a watercolor, right there on the spot, see if I could somehow make Cobalt Violet and Winsor Yellow and Permanent Red with a touch of Chinese White swirl and blend and behave impeccably, the way her colors do. I knew I couldn't, but I wanted to try. But I had to go.

And when I came back it was dark, and the next morning she looked like this. If I hadn't seen her the day before I'd still have been enchanted. 

The paler colors made the stigma even better.

Yes, I'm goin' all Georgia O'Keeffe on you. I'm in LOVE.

And the next day, Lady was folding in on herself, and a verse from Maurice Sendak came to me. 

Oh no! Please don't go! We'll eat you up, we love you so!

But Creole Lady had to go. Waving her orange stigma all the way.

She has plenty more fabulous flowers up her sleeve. Buds a poppin' all over. And bonus! She's a three-day hibiscus, like her sister. More joy for all. (Most common hibiscus flowers last but one day, then fall). 

I'm incredibly grateful to my dear friend Donna Quinn for having Logee's Greenhouse send me The Path after everything in

my greenhouse froze on November 23, 2013. 

(Warning: That Post is a Downer.) 

Everything about Donna's gesture was perfect. The name, the brilliant, rousing color of the flower, the plant itself. Big, bold, strong, a party girl! She helped pull me up out of the depths of despair after every plant I loved died so cruelly that night. 

It wasn't instant. But it worked. I have kept and loved many hibiscus plants over the decades. But these are works of art, another level of horticulture altogether. I'll never be able to go back to plain single hibiscus. Spoiled.

I deserved such a plant, and Donna showed me that. 

I laugh when I see "The Path" yelling out the back window of the greenhouse.

HEY BEES AND PEOPLE COME OVER HERE 

THERE'S AN AWESOME PARTY GOING ON IN HERE!!

WOOT WOOT!!

She makes me grin real big. In two years, she's grown to be as tall as I am. It's nothing for her to throw six flowers at once now. Aggghhhh the joy.

I'm not the only one who loves her. There's a bumblebee who has been sleeping in my greenhouse on cold nights.

This morning I woke her up taking photos, and she did a little set of bee yoga.

Upward bee! Stretch those legs!

She visits all the flowers in the greenhouse, then flies out to forage when it warms up and I open the door. 

It's good to know a bee, to offer her safe harbor in cold weather. It's good for both of us to have this place for our retreat. It's good to have The Path and Creole Lady to talk to.  

It's good to have friends.