A SERENDIPITOUS FIND IN THE GARDEN

By LADYBUG

Once upon a time, long, long ago, my gardening buddy Linda showed up at our door with a spindly seeding.

“You’ll love this!” she assured me, urging me to plant it right away.

As many of the plants in my beginner’s garden were from her, I did as instructed and waited to be amazed. It took a good little while for the seedling to mature, but when it did, it was truly a delight. Filled with pretty white flowers with deep red centres, it bloomed from late summer through to the first frost.

I learnt it was called Rose of Sharon. Over the years, it grew tall and flanking the wall of the garage, greeted me as I stepped out each morning.

My neighbour and gardening guru Dorothy loved it, too. Thus when I spotted seedlings beneath my shrub, I transplanted a few in the backyard and gave one to Dorothy.

Again, it took a few years for them to come into their own, but when they did, were we in for a surprise!

All the plants – mine in the backyard and Dorothy’s in hers – had pink or mauve blooms. Not one was white. Two different coloured offspring from a plant of an entirely different colour?

I read up about it, and this took some detective work as we’re talking about pre-everything-on-your-phone days. I learnt that a Rose of Sharon, specially the white, is a hybrid, and that seedlings from hybrids are rarely true to the parents’ colour. They tend, instead, to revert to the dominant colours in the strains that were used to create the hybrid – pink and mauve in this case.

Several years later, on a visit to Himachal Pradesh, I was delighted to see a whole Himalayan hillside covered in Rose of Sharon shrubs. Most of them pink or mauve. Left to naturalize, without hybrid interference, there they bloomed in all their glory.

Back in Canada, when we moved home a decade or so ago, I brought some of the seedlings from Linda’s original plant to my new garden. After the requisite waiting and watching – gardening teaches one patience like few other activities – they bloomed in their new space.

And you guessed it, all except one, were pink or mauve. The solitary exception was such a pale pink that it was almost white, and it had the same red centre as the plant Linda had given me.

Happy to have it back, I accepted the fact that the rest of my garden would be populated by pink and mauve flowers.

Until last year. When a seedling of the next generation matured and blossomed one beautiful summer morning with the most stunning pure white blooms. No coloured centre, just a pure, bright white.

I have, of course, offered seedlings from this to gardening buddies, so long as they absolve me of any responsibility should the flowers turn out to be some random colour!

They remind me that that’s part of the magic of gardening!