If I were paranoid, I would say that I am being stalked by the mallow family.\u00a0 Regular people cannot imagine such a thing, but we plant lovers sometimes can.\u00a0 Consider the following\u2026.While walking on a country road in central New York State, I saw a stand of tall, single-flowered hollyhocks blooming by the side of a weathered wooden building.\u00a0 Farther up the same road, a rose of Sharon stood tall, decked out in hundreds of blue-purple blooms.\u00a0 At another house, a three-foot tall \u2018Disco Belle Pink\u201d hardy hibiscus held court in the front yard, with blooms almost as big as dinner plates.\u00a0 When I got back to our summer cottage, I noticed that our newly purchased tropical hibiscus had unfurled its petals, waiting, no doubt, for a hummingbird to come and pollinate the flowers.\u00a0 When that hibiscus arrives back in New Jersey, it will join the many other mallows-in-residence, including about eight roses of Sharon and an unnamed red-flowered relative of \u2018Disco Belle Pink\u2019 that has just finished its long summer flower show.\u00a0 If the mallows in my life had voices, there would be enough of them to sing the Hallelujah Chorus.<\/p>\n
The mallow or Malvaceae family is large, containing about 95 genera, hundreds of individual species and even more cultivated varieties.\u00a0 The hollyhocks I saw, for example, most likely belong to Alcea rosea, one of about 50 Alcea species.\u00a0 Shrubby rose of Sharon, known to its botanist friends as Hibiscus syriacus, is one of about 300 hibiscus species.\u00a0 Another of them is Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, which includes our newly-acquired tropical hibiscus.\u00a0 \u201cDisco Belle Pink\u201d belongs to yet another hardy hibiscus species, Hibiscus moscheutos.<\/p>\n
Mallows have many common traits, but the most obvious is the hollyhock-like flowers, which tend to have five colorful petals arranged around a prominent central column of fused stamens. \u00a0If you spot a flower that looks like a hollyhock, it is almost certainly adorning a member of the mallow family.<\/p>\n
Mallow flowers remind me a little of poppies\u2014colorful and ephemeral.\u00a0 Each rose of Sharon bloom lasts only a single day, with hollyhocks and tropical hibiscus flowers staying on the stalk a bit longer.\u00a0 The beautiful, short-lived flower petals are not terribly substantial.\u00a0 Despite that, the plants themselves have staying power.\u00a0 Roses of Sharon may have a defined lifespan, but they self-seed so readily that they might as well be immortal.\u00a0 A mature rose of Sharon also produces hundreds of blooms in a flowering season that lasts up to a month or more.\u00a0 Tall hollyhocks, opening from the bottom up, crank out flowers for two weeks.\u00a0 The hardy hibiscus sprout flowers of eye-popping size for at least 10 days or more.\u00a0 Swamp and bog areas, like the New Jersey Meadowlands, are home to the prolific seashore mallow, which goes by the tongue-mangling Latin name of Kosteletzkya virginica. \u00a0The pink-flowered mallows bloom from June through September, beautifying places that are often considered waste spaces.<\/p>\n
Even vegetable gardeners can get in on the mallow act, by growing okra, also known as Abelmoschus esculentus, which, prior to producing its fruits, dazzles beholders with white or yellow hollyhock-like flowers with dramatic dark eye zones.\u00a0 The same kinds of flowers are also characteristic of Gossypium species, otherwise known as cotton.<\/p>\n
You may not want to grow okra or cotton, but if you need more mallow in your life, there are many highly desirable choices, all of which are readily available from nurseries and garden centers. The high mallows or Malva sylvestris have been popular over the last decade or so, especially a variety called \u2018Zebrina\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 High mallows are much like hollyhocks except a little more elegant in appearance and a bit more compact.\u00a0 \u2018Zebrina\u2019 grows two to four feet tall, with lavender flowers striped in darkest red. The plants are sun-loving, short-lived perennials that will work in large containers.\u00a0 In the garden, \u2018Zebrina\u2019 looks best when planted in odd-numbered groups.<\/p>\n
Prairie mallow or Sidalcea is sometimes known as \u201cminiature hollyhock.\u201d\u00a0 Like some other mallows, the plants tend to form clumps when they are well situated.<\/p>\n
The leaves are slightly to deeply lobed, depending on proximity to the ground, but almost no one buys any mallow solely for its foliage.\u00a0 Sidalcea also grows two to four feet tall, with erect spikes of pink flowers that appear in summer.\u00a0 Though the flowers have the typical hollyhock configuration, they are more delicate in appearance.\u00a0 \u201cElsie Heugh\u2019, winner of the Royal Horticultural Society\u2019s Award of Garden Merit (AGM), is my favorite sidalcea because of its elegant fringed petals.<\/p>\n
No good flower garden should be without some kind of mallow.\u00a0 The problem\u2014at least in my garden\u2014is stopping with one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If I were paranoid, I would say that I am being stalked by the mallow family.\u00a0 Regular people cannot imagine such a thing, but we plant lovers sometimes can.\u00a0 Consider the following\u2026.While walking on a country road in central New York State, I saw a stand of tall, single-flowered hollyhocks blooming by the side of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[635,637,639,640,641,636,457,638],"class_list":["post-885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-summer","tag-hibiscus","tag-hollyhock","tag-hollyhock-family","tag-mallow-family","tag-mallows","tag-malva","tag-rose-of-sharon","tag-tropical-hibiscus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":886,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions\/886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}