How to propagate rose of sharon shrubs so you can enjoy their beautiful blooms all over your garden every summer!
Rose of sharon is one of those plants that just say “summer” to me. The blooms look almost tropical and come out every year when the weather is at its hottest and we’re right in the thick of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. The really fun part is that they’re so easy to grow that I almost forget that they’re even there until they’re suddenly in full bloom. It’s such a great surprise every year. Chances are, if you own one of these plants, you already know about this super simple way to propagate rose of sharon. If you never realized just how simple it is to create dozens of these plants though, I thought I’d better let you know!
How I Learned to Propagate Rose of Sharon
I only came to know about this method of propagation because this is how I ended up with my rose of sharon in the first place. I was given a tiny plant that had been propagated this way and I was so amazed at how quickly it grew. It had several blooms that first year that I put it in the ground and it was what you could call a full sized shrub within about two years. It’s been a few more years now and it’s about eight or nine feet tall!
How to Propagate Rose of Sharon
The key first step comes at the end of the season in the fall. Your shrub will fill up with seed pods and this is obviously going to be very important to the whole process. Wait until the seed pods are fully-formed and look like they’re about to burst. Then, very carefully, without disturbing the plant, you need to make your way out to the garden and….do nothing. Ha!
Just let the seeds fall and do what they will. 🙂 Here you can see some of our seed pods from last year still on the plant. I leave them all winter because they actually look really beautiful in the snow.
The next very important step comes the next spring, when again, you want to wait until just the right moment when you start to see those bright green baby leaves forming on your shrub. At this point you want to very carefully, and very gently…do nothing.
Avoid weeding an area of about two feet around the bottom of your rose of sharon and you’ll soon start to see lots and lots of little green rose of sharons popping up all over the place. Again, it’s absolutely imperative that you do nothing. 🙂
Allow them to continue to grow until the end of the summer. In the fall, you should have plants that are at least six to eight inches tall that you can dig up and move to new locations around your garden. If you’ve never tried this before, you’ll be amazed to see how quickly these will grow and fill in year after year.
So that’s all there is to it! I’m hoping to add of a few of these to the front of our house this year to add a little extra interest during those late summer weeks. I think we have about 200 little shoots growing so far, so I may need to find a few other homes for them as well. 🙂
Do you grow rose of sharon in your garden?
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.