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 to 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.