Loropetalum
Loropetalum chinense
also called chinese fringe flower
The burgundy-leaved evergreen in half the new landscapes of the South: fringe flowers like shredded pink ribbon in spring, wine-dark foliage all year, and a witch hazel cousin's toughness.
- Type
- Shrub · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Purple and burgundy
- Flower color
- Pink
- Sunlight
- Full sun for the darkest leaf color
- Watering
- Moderate
- Soil
- Acid, moist, well-drained
- Feeding
- Gentle all-organic
- USDA zones
- 7a–10b
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Plant out
- at the last spring frost
- Plant spacing
- 6 ft 7 in
- In-row spacing
- 4 ft 11 in
- Between rows
- 8 ft 2 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- A fine surface mat, and nothing below it
- Working depth
- 4–12 in
- Can reach
- 18 in down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 8–12 ft across, about 1–1.5× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 16 in of soil
Hair-fine roots in a shallow felt, with no deep anchor to fall back on. It cannot chase water, so it is the first casualty of a drought and the first thing killed by a hoe. Mulch it, never cultivate around it, and never let it go dry in its first two summers.
The habit is Loropetalum’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- When
- Not harvested. Prune right after the big spring bloom, and only if the plant was sited too small.
- What to look for
- Fringe flowers finished; stems reaching past their allotted space.
- How to harvest
- Thin whole stems back inside the outline rather than shearing the surface, and the fountain shape survives. A sheared one turns into a dense meatball that blooms only on the surface.
- How often
- Once, after bloom. If it needs cutting more than that, the honest fix is moving it somewhere bigger in fall.
- Storing the crop
- Nothing to store. The burgundy foliage is the year-round harvest.
The most common mistake is scale: many "compact" cultivars reach 3 m and get sheared into resentful meatballs. Buy a genuine dwarf for foundations, give the big ones room to fountain, and it needs almost nothing else.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com