'Silver Pink'
Rock Rose
"What a desolate place would be the world without a flower."
-Arthur James,
First Earl of Balfour
(1848-1930)
First Earl of Balfour
(1848-1930)
'Silver Pink' Rock Rose (or Rockrose) has tissue-paper thin satin-pink to salmon flowers, with yellow eye circled in white, on a slightly shorter than average rockrose, with wide spread.
The two-inch flowers occur starting in May, lasting into July, & can be exceedingly numerous on a mature shrub. Although each individual bloom is quite ephemeral lasting only a day or two, it produces such a great number of buds that they are continously opening, showing themselves to best effect on the sunniest days.
Of the May photos on this page, the second photo captures in the background a blossom of a Shrubby Rock Rose Halimiocistus wintonensis).
When young this rockrose sometimes has a loose & open, upright habit, but it can be made more compact & bushy by pinching back the tips after it finishes flowering. When very mature it can be as high as three feet with a spread of four feet or greater.Lance-shaped leaves with undulating margins are dark silvery-sage green above, lighter below. Its foliage really stands out when surrounded by leatherier & greener rockroses.
It's not as cold-hardy as some rockroses, & our Zone 8 is on the cool side, so despite that it is evergreen, ours in its first year dropped quite a few of its leaves through the winter & seemed semi-deciduous, but without harming it. This isn't apt to happen every year, & in zones nine & ten it would be fully evergreen.
Despite that it may be a little less fully evergreen through a cold winter, it is nevertheless extremely hardy for a temperate zone, & was selected by the University of British Columbia as an exceptional cultivar for the Northwest region.
All rockroses prefer full sun & all require the best-draining soil especially when grown in the rainy Northwest. They can take the rain but not if they steep in poorly draining ground.
When well established they rarely need watering even in droughty summer, as their true homeland is through some of the dryest parts of the Mediterranean region, so they are adapted to summers that are long & droughty. Ours is in a streetside sun-garden that gets both morning & afternoon sun.