Cherry Ice - Survival is Nice!

Before Hurricane Katrina, our most thirsty plant was the Cherry Ice hibiscus. No matter how often we watered Cherry Ice, the pot was always the first to dry out and have the plant wilt. Cherry Ice also likes to grow straight and tall. As part of our evacuation strategy, when we wedged all our plants into the back corner of yard behind the garage, the tallest plants go up against the fence. As such, Cherry Ice was put in the corner. On our initial trip back to Kenner, it had only dead leaves. We figured it had dried up and died. In the last weekend of October 2005, we cleaned up all the tree branches covering our patio in front of our garage. We had a little garden area between the driveway and our neighbor's fence off the patio. We had four in ground garden variety hibiscus and smaller flowering plants in this garden patch. After seven weeks of being underneath a six foot high pile of heavy oak tree branches, the little garden are had four badly damaged, but alive hibiscus, some Louisiana Iris and daylily leaves and that was it! We decided to bring out some of the bigger pots from behind the garage and fill in all the barren ground area of this little garden patch. As we retrieved plants in that northwest corner, we discovered that our Cherry Ice had not died; only the high branches that we could see were dead. The first foot of the plant was covered with a lot of vigorous new growth. Unbelievable! Cherry Ice’s bloom is one of the prettiest around. We have not had much success getting it to bloom, but when it does, like this May 2005 bloom, it is well worth the wait.