The last plant to bloom this season in my yard opened its flowers in early October. It was not a rose, but rather a Rose of Sharon (aka Althaea) that had lain dormant for many years.

I didn’t expect much when I planted this member of the Hibiscus family recommended for Zones 5-8, for I live in Zone 3. I covered it with mulch each fall and looked for signs of life each spring. Hope turned into frustration that it hadn’t taken hold, and I was prepared to yank it from the soil this year.

I’d given up on it when I noticed, stunned, it was finally beginning to leaf out. Ecstatic, I ran to my desk where I file plant tags, since I had forgotten what color it was, it had been so long. So these new stunning white blossoms with red centers and striking stamens marked a personal achievement, indeed.

I planted the Rose of Sharon when I first arrived in the mountains of Northern New Hampshire six years ago. It had been one of my favorite shrubs grown by a childhood neighbor in Connecticut. Like the Althaea, I didn’t expect it to take root in this remote area, let alone blossom.

Fresh from divorce and heartbreak, I thought of the north woods as a lovely rest stop, where I might lick my wounds for a bit before returning to the city. This wasn’t the proper zone for a newly single and savvy woman like me. Like the last two lines of Thomas Moore’s poem, “The Last Rose of Summer”: Oh! who would inhabit, This bleak world alone?

But the beauty of the place overrode my pragmatism and I established myself here, much to the chagrin of friends and family. “How will you survive up there?” they wondered. While I have certainly learned a good many things to sustain myself in the North Country, one of the most fortuitous has been learning to live by nature’s clock, rather than my own.

And at this time of the year that means putting the gardens to rest and preparing for winter. It involves cutting back perennials, pruning shrubs, covering the compost pile, putting away the tractor and changing the oil in the snow blower, stacking seasoned wood, fertilizing the lawn one last time, and putting snow tires on the car.

Rose of Sharon is often referred to as Rosasharn, the name of a character in John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Rosasharn is impractical and fragile, a pregnant young woman as she begins her journey to California. It takes her several hundred pages to mature, not unlike my fragile Zone 5 Rose of Sharon that required so many years to take hold in this precarious Zone 3 climate. Also not unlike myself as well, a woman who took several years to take hold and mature in this precarious place.

By Casey Pike, Master Gardener