By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on July 2, 2002
Hill Country summers are hard on most flowering plants, even native plants. By July many blooming wildflowers and shrubs, whether in the wild or in the garden, are in a summer slump.
However, one native shrub which keeps blooming through the heat and on into the fall is pavonia, the Operation NICE! (Natives Instead of the Common Exotics!) Plant for July.
Pavonia (Pavonia lasiopetala) is a pink-flowering shrub native to South Texas and the Edwards Plateau.
Some of the common names by which this plant is known are rose pavonia, rose mallow. and rockrose.
Many people in the Hill Country have found that pavonia does well as a landscape plant, either in sunny spots or in part shade.
The rose-pink blooms resemble miniature hibiscus flowers. The blooms are small, but usually are abundant. Individual flowers are an inch or two wide and have a prominent yellow stamen column in the center of the five petals.
Their long blooming period is from late spring until a hard frost in the fall. Pavonia grows three or four feet high and can spread out a yard or more wide.
Pavonia seems as tough as it is attractive. A few years ago our neighbors generously gave us a couple of pavonia plants from their yard, but the transfer was not delicate.
Tom came over with two blooming plants he had pulled up by the roots. I planted the bare-rooted pavonias without preparing any special soil, but made sure they stayed moist.
In a few days the plants had survived the shock and began to put on new leaves and blooms. Once established, they did not require much watering.
Pavonia also is resistant to cold. Ours usually survive all but the hardest freezes. This year I was surprised that one plant did not come back from the late-winter freeze.
However, a smaller plant that had come up near the dead plant had survived the frigid weather very well. Why was the smaller plant the tougher of the two?
I found the answer to my question in two books on gardening with native plants by Sally and Andy Wasowski and by Jill Nokes. According to them, it is normal for pavonia bushes to decline after three or four years. That is not the problem it might seem. Pavonia easily self-seeds, and there will be younger plants coming up to replace the older ones.
Pavonias and free information sheets on growing them are available at the local nurseries cooperating with Operation NICE!: Barkley’s Nursery, Boerne in Bloom, Hill Country African Violets and Nursery, and Where Wild Things Grow (Leon Springs).
Our NICE! plant for May, the blackfoot daisy, proved a little embarrassing to us, because that plant was not available at the nurseries in May. Now it is back in stock in local nurseries.
It is a great little plant. The three or four clumps of blackfoot daisies in our backyard are still blooming, even after an almost rainless spring.
