Cistus

An evergreen western-Mediterranean rockrose for the hottest, driest, leanest corner of a full-sun garden. Soft grey-felted foliage carries large, papery, crumpled pink flowers through spring and early summer, each open for a single day. Built for drought and poor soil, it is short-lived and resents wet, cold, or rich ground - a plant to site hard and never to pamper.

Montpellier rockrose (Cistus monspeliensis) is an evergreen Mediterranean shrub of the maquis and matorral scrublands, growing to roughly 3–4 feet with narrow, wrinkled, sticky-glandular leaves that carry a warm resinous scent in the heat. Through late spring it opens a long succession of small white five-petalled flowers, each lasting a single day. It is a plant built for the hardest sun-baked, drought-stricken, poor-soil conditions where little else thrives, which is exactly its garden value and its honest catch: it wants heat and sharp drainage, is not reliably hardy in cold-winter gardens (roughly USDA zone 8 and warmer), and where it has been introduced to a similar climate, notably California, it can naturalise and spread beyond the garden.