Isn't she beautiful? This is Alyogyne Ruth Bancroft, developed at the Ruth Bancroft Gardens - I looked them up, excitedly, and they look like a great place to visit, but unfortunately are just to the east of San Francisco, so not exactly convenient. She's a hybrid, grown from two native Australian hibscus (hibisca? hibicuses?) and was a wonderful gift from a newly minted English creative writing PhD at the end of last semester, together with some mallows (the writer was moving east, to a climate inhospitable to such plants). I wasn't at all sure that she'd make it (the plant, that is, not the increasingly successful writer) - she's still in a huge pot, though, and seems, after some initial drooping and us cutting her right, right back, to be happy and flowering. I've tried ... but it's impossible to capture in a photograph the translucent pale mauve in a way that conveys how delicate and magical she is: I'm just going to have to hope for the right shaft of light, at some point.
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