Spiraea Pink-A-Licious®

Pink-A-Licious is an attractive, compact, and uniformly mounded shrub, growing slightly wider than tall. Densely branched and fine-textured. Plants that become irregular with age can be pruned in early spring to return them to vigor and uniformity. Unlike its white flowered mother, the Pink-a-licious™ spirea has abundant, purplish-pink, flat-topped clusters of flowers in June. This cultivar has a wonderful compact and densely branched habit. It grows to 2 feet tall and 3 feet wide in southern Wisconsin. The summer foliage is clean and an attractive dark green. Fall foliage color on this plant can be outstanding, a combination of the colors of a fruit salad—pineapple yellow, watermelon pink, honeydew chartreuse, and cantaloupe orange—all on the same plant at the same time. An attractive and durable, low-growing shrub that can be grown individually or massed in a mixed border, as a filler or masking plant in front of taller shrubs, on slopes, as a foundation shrub, and in any other sites needing a shrub of its size and adaptability. Site it where its attractive early summer flowers, good dark green summer foliage, and wild mélange of fall colors can all be appreciated.

This selection was developed by Mike Yanny of JN Plant Selections, LLC, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It originated from a batch of open-pollinated seed collected and germinated at Johnson’s Nursery in 2000 from a white-flowered plant of Spiraea fritschiana. The plant is possibly a hybrid with Spiraea japonica (syn. S. x bumalda) ‘Norman’, which was growing near the seed parent. The species S. fritschiana is reportedly widespread in the wild in China and Korea, but it is relatively uncommon in cultivation in the United States.

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