'Raspberry Ripple'
Sunrose
"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."
-John Muir
(1890-1914)
(1890-1914)
The inch-round tricolor flowers on Helianthemum nummularium 'Raspberry Ripple' have a yellow eye surrounded by white & red petals. These flowers can be quite varied shrublet to shrublet, or even from one year to the next of a single shrub, but as a generality, each flower has a large zone of pure raspberry red around the yellow eye, with white edging & streaks.
It is at the height of bloom in May & June, but here in Zone 8 it can be induced to bloom again for August & September by giving it a sheering in July or whenever it seems to have stopped flowering. It will not have time to rebloom in chillier zones than ours.
Lightly silvered mat-forming evergreen foliage mounds up to as much as fifteen inches high, though usually only eight inches to a foot tall, especially with periodic sheering to induce rebloom & to keep it compact rather than leggy in its creeping outward sprawl.
It is the perfect dry-garden edging plant, so dense with its evergreen leaves that it smothers weeds, & provides extravagant swathes of color in garden-spots beyond the reach of watering or irrigation.
All sunroses are drought tolerant & suited to xeriscape gardening. Silvery-leaf varieties like 'Raspberry Ripple,' 'Wisley Pink' & 'Henfield Brilliant' are even more drought tolerant than the shiny greenleafed varieties like 'Mrs. Mold.'
Space them one foot to eight inches apart & they will spread into a continuous groundcover. A light soil is best. As a hardy alpine semi-woody perennial, this sunrose can be grown in climates that fall to minus 20 degrees F., so has no troubles with our temperate winters so long as soil drains extremely well to see them safely through rainy seasons. It wants fullest sun but if need be will tolerate a moderate amount of shade with only a small dip in blooming power.