[Villages Kahuna]

We have five different varieties of hibiscus at our house. One variety, Snow Queen, didn't make it thru the slight freeze last winter and had to be replaced. The replacement plants have nice foliage, but no buds or flowers. On the other end of the spectrum, our "white with dark maroon centers" plants that we bought at Porter's are thriving. Today both of those plants have about two dozen beautiful flowers each and plenty more buds. Our yellow plants looked pretty sick after last winter's nip, but while they haven't recovered to anywhere near the size of the white ones, they are also blooming. Another variety, with green, red and pink varigated foliage look healthy, but no flowers. Two of our three pink tree hibiscus are doing fine and are just ready to burst forth with flowers. The third one will need to be replaced. I use a "rooting and blooming" fertilizer, about 10-60-10 as I recall, applying it with a watering can every couple of weeks.

Why can't nature be precisely predictable? It would make old engineers like me a lot happier.