Last winter, I traded seeds with a guy from New York on Gardenweb.com’s perennial forum. He had seeds for these wonderful Hibiscus moscheutos ‘Blue River’ and I had to give them a try. I don’t usually go for large, gaudy flowers, but these were just too cool to pass up. I had about a dozen of them and have given some away to relatives. There are still six or so in little pots on my deck, and now that the weather has finally cooled a bit, I can put them in the ground. Just need to decide where to put them!
These two are in large pots on the deck where they will remain as permanent container plantings. These ones in the large pots got a lot bigger than the ones still in the 4″ pots, and the smaller ones won’t be flowering this year. It was nice to get flowers out of these ones the first year from seed.
These are enormous flowers — they’re about seven inches across!
Well, looking at online photos, Blue River II is supposed to be pure white, with no dark eye. And I can’t even find anything about the original Blue River variety. It looks like these are a mongrel of sorts from a Blue River II parent and some other variety of hibiscus. But that’s OK, because I think they look really cool! I’m just not sure I have a good place in the flowerbeds for the other ones that didn’t go into these pots. They’re kinda gaudy! But I’m going to try to figure it out.
I just heard from Donn who gave me these seeds that they’re actually Blue River II, not the main Blue River variety. I’ll have to remember that.