July 9th 2025
My hibiscus plant is ten years old I just realised! In my early pictures, the leaves were a much darker green than they are now.
There are many hybrids these days, but I still like this simple red one. Sometimes i cut a stem and flower and put it in a vase, and it lives a little longer than the one day. I have seen sunbirds and butterflies nectaring on this hibiscus. Tailorbirds go up and down the stems, and in the soil looking for small insects.
This sun-loving low maintenance plant suits me very well. In the early days, the stems would get aphids. I just snipped off the paticular stem, and it seems that the plant has become resistant to aphids these last few years.
The petals are sometimes together and sometimes apart, it is quite fascinating. Each days they look a bit different.
Georgia O Keefe, the American artist painted them - Hibiscus with Plumeria, 1939, Suposedly she was commisioned by the pineapple company Dole to go off to Hawaii and draw them a pineapple, and Ms O Keefe enjoyed her all-expense paid trip - painting, the waterfalls, and gorges and various tropical fauna including this painting, but no pineapple! Dole finally brought a fruit to her studio and she drew one, reluctantly! More details here:
And then there is Andy Warhol who had a series called Flowers. He took inspiration from Patricia Caulfield's photograph of hibiscuses, and rendered them into a silkscreen print - and got sued for his troubles. What an interesting story.
Closer to home, Ravi Verma's paintings quite often had hibiscus - either adorning on of of the female heroines or in the garden around.
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| My hibiscus sketch of today. It made me notiec the way the petails overlapped, the fine frilly edges That i could not capture, the fine veins on the petals and the strong stamen spike. |
