Pros:
- Massive quantities of flowers for about 3 months
- Bees love the blooms
- The plant doesn’t need any care to thrive
- We’ve transplanted a few of the seedlings. They’re true to their parent in terms of color, but the parents seems like a double bloom and the children seem like single bloom
- If you want a hedge, this seems like a good option
Cons:
- Seeds! So many seeds. Each of its hundreds (thousands?) of flowers will produce 10+ seeds. They all don’t germinate, but it’s a numbers game. If you want to avoid pulling volunteers up you’re best off pulling the seed pods off the plant before they open on their own
I pulled ~2 gallons of seed pods off a week prior to this picture. My wife dumped them in the compost, so no epic 5+ gallon photo 😭
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Followed suit today. Been putting it off for a few weeks now
Some of those are looking pretty ripe! I like to try to get a block of time to go after the bush in long chunks, but that’s not always possible. How big is yours / how many do you have? We have two. One is tiny (about 3 feet tall), but the other is pretty big/bushy (10 feet tall or so). The big one takes an hour or two to pull all the seed pods off…
I have just one (really small garden). It’s fairly big though, I’d guess around 10 feet high. I couldn’t reach the top so there are still some pods there. Picture from the end of August for reference:
That’s a very nice looking area. Your Roe of Sharon is much better pruned than ours - we more or less let it to wild and trim the sides if it’s getting unruley. I also suspect yours is more mature based on the size of the trunk towards the top. Ours is still flexible enough that I can grab an offshoot and pull the whole branch it’s connected to down.
Looking at yours, and thinking about our 3’ tall one we grew from seed, I think our original plant is really a collection of a bunch of individual plants that were grown in a common pot.
Seeds in the compost? I hope you got them early, or that compost heap will be smothered next spring!
Thankfully the seeds don’t seem very robust. This is year three of just tossing them into the pile and none have grown in it so far.
It’s, uh, self-nitrogenising compost.
I used to have a lovely one in my back yard that had purple and white flowers. If I was smart I would have made a cutting before I moved.
You could write the current owner, explaining who you are that you miss the plant, and would pay him like $20 for a cutting or a seed pod.
Or grabbed a seed pod ;)
Ours is from a local nursery. It’s been in the ground at our house somewhere between 8 and 10 years and it’s loving life! Its 4 year old seedlings are four feet tall and putting out decent blooms now too. It’s never too late to plant another one.
This is such a nice problem to have. I want to see the roses, could you post photos of them?
Edit: I found some in your post history but I wouldn’t say no to more :D
You could possibly sell them if you let them seed and dry out.
I can’t imagine they’re worth much, but if you want some I’ll ship them your way. Ditto for cana lilies - we have a bumper crop this year.
I see people selling seeds on places like etsy all the time. Problem is you’ll have to let them mature to sell them, which would inevitably be more getting in the yard and germinating.
I’d be surprised if they didn’t germinate inside the compost and share the love around the garden…
Thankfully the seeds don’t seem that robuy
Dumb ass question, but are the seeds edible (like pumpkin or poppy seeds etc)?
No idea. The green seeds are not that big, but they are soft. Once they’re mature they turn pretty hard. Green they would be hard to process/remove from the seed pods.
I guess being that small even if they were edible it wouldn’t be worth it shelling them and such. I do lament there being no full 5 gallon photo 😄
If they’re edible dry, it should be fairly straightforward to build something to crush the pods and then sift out the seeds. Perhaps they could be milled into a type of flour? I still don’t think the yield would be that high, but at least some use would come of them.
