Virginia Richards Rhododendron

Big, bold, and beautiful, the Virginia Richards Rhododendron is a stand-out beauty for your garden. Enormous flowers, 4 ½ inches across, are held in full clusters of up to 12 blooms, making a fantastic show. The flowers are a clear, magical, rose-pink when they first open, changing to apricot and then yellow as they age, bringing you a kaleidoscope of shades that will amaze you day after day. The leathery, light-green leaves, 4 ½ inches long, are held for three seasons, keeping this plant full and dense. It has a good rounded form, producing plenty of branches to carry an abundance of blooms. Flowering right in the middle of rhododendron season, it’s the icing on your cake of spring flowers. It is also vigorous, reaching 4 feet in a decade, and double that at maturity. Grow it as background to smaller varieties, as a stand-out in the planting around your house, or in more natural, wooded areas. Wherever in your garden you grow in it, be ready to be amazed.

• Very large, full trusses of blooms in the middle of rhododendron season
• Vibrant blooms open rosy-pink, turning apricot and then yellow as they mature
• Bold leathery foliage on a dense, rounded bush
• Vigorous growers, reaching 4 feet in a few years, and maturing around 8 feet tall and wide
• Plant in acidic soils for good growth and blooming

Grow your Virginia Richards Rhododendron in light, open shade, such as beneath deciduous trees. It will also enjoy some morning sun. Not very cold-hardy, but reliable in zone 7. Plant in acidic soil, with a pH value of 6.0 or less. Well-drained but rich soil is best, and this plant isn’t particularly drought tolerant. Use plenty of lime-free compost, shredded pine bark or needles, or rotted leaves to enrich the soil and for mulch to preserve the moisture in the soil. Deer won’t eat it and it generally has no pests or diseases. Summer watering is usually needed, and plants left dry are more prone to leaf diseases. There is no need to prune or trim – we don’t recommend you do – but removing spent flowers on younger plants encourages profuse blooming the following spring.