Scott Fillmer

This is the first year we have actually had a Confederate Rose (bush, plant, tree) in the garden and we waited all summer for it to bloom. But apparently they are the last hold outs of the summer and once they finally started blooming it was clear, the summer is on its way out. No more warm summer blooms for a while after this.

The Confederate Rose, also called all kinds of things like the Cotton Rose, got it’s name in the south because:

…according to legend, the flowers soaked up the blood spilled on battlefields during the civil war. Felder Rushing, the co-author of Passalong Plants, an influential book on Southern gardening, recalls that ladies in Mobile, Alabama, gave these flowers to Confederate soldiers returning home from the war.

(Everything You Need to Know About the Cotton Rose, Southern Living)

We had a friend of ours give us clippings from their plants and when we got them they were literally sticks as you can see below (this was in May). By July they had grown taller than Deborah, and now in October they are about 20 feet tall and 6-8 feet in diameter. Not bad for one summer when we weren’t sure if they would even survive being moved.

Today I finally got a chance to take some decent photos of the blooms and they will make it into my daily photo journal for today (Project 365 for 2022 if interested). Now that these bushes(?) have made it to tree size I’m not sure we should have planted them so close together, but if you see something blooming in the south right now, this is what it is.