Plant of the Day: Seven-son flower - Heptacodium miconioides
Photo of Seven-son flower - Heptacodium miconioides

Photo by Mark Kane

Twice as Nice


Can you name a shrub that flowers twice in the same growing season? Me neither, at least I couldn’t until I met Seven-son flower. It’s a big, rangy, deciduous shrub from China that makes small white flowers in clusters, then “blooms” again when the calyx at the base of the flower buds spreads open into skinny pink “petals.” The white show and the pink show prolong the flowering season over two months (with a pause in the middle).


This shrub is still a youngster in gardening, introduced from China in 1980, but it has plenty of admirers already for its hardiness (Zone 5, maybe Zone 4), its bloom, and its bark, which peels in strips. It’s from the honeysuckle family and like many of its kin wants to make a lot of stems, but with pruning, it can be trained to a single trunk. Allowed to branch at will, it can reach 15 to 20 feet tall and almost as wide.


So Seven-son flower has three seasons of interest: winter, for the bark, summer for the white flowers, and early autumn, for its cloud of pink. This is a promising shrub for larger gardens, happy in full sun and light shade, not fussy about soil and moderately fast-growing. The one at Iowa Arboretum, half an hour from Des Moines, is ten years old and eight feet tall.


By Mark Kane - the Groundskeeper, YourGardenShow.com

Copyright © 2012 YourGardenShow.com

Want to read more about this plant and other varieties? Click here for the Seven-son flower - Heptacodium miconioides Plant Page!

Plant Photo Tagging - How it Works

Video by Tom Finerty, founder YourGardenShow.com

Plant Photo Tagging allows you to turn any garden photo into a rich tapestry of what you have planted. It’s fun, informative, and helpful to others visiting your garden. As you photo tag, you can easily add plant names from our database and/or make notes about anything you’d like. To get started, sign-in and go to your Garden.


Click on any image in your garden's slideshow Carousel to get to full-view mode. Click on the “Tag” icon just below your photo and you are ready to tag! Simply click and drag your mouse over a plant or area you’d like to highlight or tag. A pop-up box will appear and ask for either a plant name or a note - add one or both, then click “tag” and you’ve just tagged your garden!


Write and tell us your suggestion for a "How it Works" video:
how-it-works@yourgardenshow.com


For more info contact: help@yourgardenshow.com

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Plant of the Day archive

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