Flower for the Day Rose of Sharon 7-20-26

Our Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) was a gift from a friend who is a master gardener. Since it can grow 14 feet tall and ten feet wide we prune it in the late fall after the first freeze. It is resilient to draught but as you can plainly see not to deer. They have pruned the base symmetrically.  Ours is a mixture of three multi-stemmed woody stems each producing subtly different color flowers.   The tree is right outside the living room window. We really enjoyed watching the robins as the built a nest well inside the base. There is no modern poem about the Rose of Sharon. Here is some information about the Poet SR Griffin that I found interesting. Griffin founded his imprint, Rose of Sharon press in1989. He published and edited underground poetry journals. In his attempts to bring poetry to a wider audience, outside of publishing broadsides, chapbooks, and periodicals, Griffin has placed poems on billboards and beer bottles. In 2010 Griffin adapted a 1970 240-MK Vietnam War -era practice bomb to house poetry instead of explosives, gathering over 900 poems from around the world. American pinstripe artist and fabricator Skratch pinstriped the bomb, which Griffin named Elsie in honor of his paternal grandmother. Between April and June 2010, Griffin toured with Elsie the Poetry Bomb across the c <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States>ountry, appearing at 30 different venues, and inviting people to put their poems inside. Of the inspiration behind the project, he said: "War, the art, artifact and artifice of war were created to invent and enforce agreements. Hopefully by transforming this piece I have created something that will inspire disagreements. The democratic process depends upon disagreement in order to function.... The Poetry Bomb is a weapon of mass discussion."