Garden Update May 2014 #1: Rose of Sharon or Hibiscus

I am way behind on posting about our garden updates.  I have so much to post that I am going to start with one of my favorite things that is happening.  We had this Rose of Sharon or Hibscus bush in the front yard of our Belwood house that always bloomed in July, the same month we moved in.  I loved that bush for that reason but last year my Mom visited when it was flowering and she said she had never seen a Rose of Sharon with two whorls in the flowers so we decided we had to figure out how to propagate the plant. I already posted about this so the first two photos below are repeats but I thought that they told the story well of the hibiscus (?) so far:

Bush on the right has flowers, this photo is from right before we moved in.

Chris did a great job trying to propagate six sprigs we cut from the bush in both soil and water.  This one worked! He started it in water and moved it to soil.  One other sprig grew leaves but not as big as this one. This photo was taken on 2/4/14.

The sprig lost its first three leaves so we thought it was a goner.  But we optimistically planted it in our new backyard.  This photo was taken on 4/27/14 and was the first time we noticed new leaves, three months after the photo above! The two "antennae" on top of the sprig are the remnants of the old leaves. You can see how the top primary meristem is not growing, but the branch axillary meristems are growing now.

This photo was taken today 5/1/14.  The leaves look like they are the same size but the photo is actually taken from further out.  Go Rose of Sharon!