Red hibiscus after being dramatically cut back
Sentimentality alert! First though, my apologies for not having posted for the past few days. It has been particularly hectic with a number of commitments that required more effort than I had anticipated. Ah well, we all underestimate tasks at times. With that said – I want to talk about the red hibiscus in the photo. If you’ve been following the blog, you know we have had a considerable amount of work done in our back yard. If you are new to the blog – welcome – and we allowed the back yard to get rather out of control and brought in a landscape designer to correct it. One of the mistakes we made was with the red hibiscus that we have. When we first moved into this house, my best friend who lived next door gave us the red hibiscus in the standard three-gallon plastic pot as a house-warming present. Since we intended to put the pool and hot tub in and have our tropical paradise in back, we decided to leave the hibiscus in that container until the pool was finished. Well, that was before we knew of all the delays we were going to encounter. The poor hibiscus lingered, somewhat neglected and became rather scraggly. By the time we transplanted it into a beautiful large ceramic pot, we were concerned that perhaps we’d neglected it too much. However, it took to its new home and flourished.
In fact, what we didn’t know was that when you plant something like a hibiscus in a container, it’s important to move it around periodically because otherwise, the main root will find that hole in the container and grow through it into the ground. Now, we did notice that the magnificently flowering shrub was getting quite large and our second mistake was in not trimming it back. Then, sadly, my dear friend passed away at much too young an age as the cancer she had once beat came back with a vengeance. For me, the now thriving hibiscus was a symbol of the friendship we had enjoyed for too brief a time. I asked our regular lawn care guys to transplant it into the yard and that was when we discovered that the root was so firmly attached that if we attempted to transplant, it would likely destroy the hibiscus as well as the pot.
Okay, so when we brought in the landscape designer, I explained the situation and she said she had a potential solution, although she couldn’t guarantee that it would work. She cut the hibiscus back to practically nothing and said that if it grew back, as she though it would, to just keep it trimmed to a manageable level. The blossom in the photo is the first since “the surgery” and there are some more buds. We shall see if this works, but it does look promising.
