"Everyone had hollyhocks."

August 06, 2022

"Everyone had hollyhocks."

Hollyhocks - Alcea rosea (Varas de San José - Staff of Joseph)

Flowers have of countenance as much as men or animals. Some seem to smile, some have a sad expression, some are pensive and diffident, others are plain, honest and upright like the broad-faced sunflower and the hollyhock."
-Henry Ward Beecher (June 24, 1813 - March 8, 1887)

"I am very busy picking up stems and stamens as the hollyhocks leave their clothes around." - Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886)

Last year, I blanked completely on the name of these--and all Gloria could think of was 'Varas de San José.' I was stunned at the sudden hole in my memory, and a bit dismayed. It was weeks before HOLLYHOCK finally bubbled up out of the muck. This season, as soon as I saw the cluster of young plants I knew their names, comfortable and familiar: hollyhocks, hollyhocks, hollyhocks! But what I couldn't dredge up -- what color were they/ are they going to be? (I am now in my mid-60s and nervously watching myself for the early signs of memory loss, and fretting about the shrinking world it would bring with it.) This, I thought, is one worry I can address! I can do a quick blog post that has photos, so that next year (provided I remember to consult the blog), I will know in a flash what to expect where. The cluster between the raised bed, the New Mexico Honeysuckle that friends gave us as a housewarming gift, and the recent grave of our 8 yr-old hen Sophie, will be lovely hot pinks, a delicate pale pink and a stray white.

(Thee white is in the background on the left.
Small plant/ lovely blossoms.)

The complete inventory includes 3 more plants--small, badly chewed by the bugs but still standing, having found and claimed little puddles of sun, and held their own against the sprawling Wisteria: a pale pink and a medium red, and over near the Lambs Ears by the bird bath, a second red.

What we might have in 2024 (two years from now, since they are biennials)?
Pale yellows next to the small clump of irises that were transplanted from Abuelo's house before they sold it last year.

This is how it happens
Taking walks in the afternoon during my lunch break, I admired a splendid stand my neighbor has growing all along her front fence by the road. Yellows, whites, pinks and reds--all the traditional colors--blooming brightly between her sunny tiger lilies. The pale yellows were so unusual and appealing, I couldn't resist. I reached through the chain links, snapped off a nob of seeds, and slipped them nonchalantly into my pocket. Then showing what for me is impressive speed and determination, I actually got them into the ground and watered by the end of the week.

Note: April and May were brutally hot and dry this year, with wildfires ranging all around the state. I suspect that our neighbor does not hand water them; the plants were smaller and leaner than in better seasons. I do not know how that will affect the viability/ vitality of the seeds I snitched and planted?

1881 Botanische wandplanten
Illustrators - Ant. Hartinger und G. v. Beck

I think there is a larger point here, illustrating the role of flowers in facilitating seed dispersal? :) And it is a busy intersection! I suddenly see an image of my grandfather pulling a napkin out of his suit coat pocket and carefully folding a few seeds into it. (We were at any number of lush, old gardens in Britain at the time.) What was Michael Pollan's thesis in The Botany of Desire, that plants MAY be using us as surely as we think we are using them?

Apparently, hollyhocks have charmed and hitched rides with scores of people for several thousand years. In Plants in Garden History, British gardening giant, Penelope Hobhouse says they were probably among the many plants collected by Assyrian King Tiglath-Pilesar (1114-1026 BC) (PGH, 17). He, like many generations of Assyrian royalty, is thought to have had private courtyard gardens inside the palace--geometric affairs with fountains and flowers and fruit trees. A succession of rulers had their agents out ceaselessly combing the outer reaches of the empire, in search of the next new new thing (ancient plant hunters in flowing robes with deep pockets and whatever the ancient equivalent of the dinner napkin might have been.)

Bas Relief depiction of Assyrian Hanging Gardens

A couple of accounts I read (none with decent bibliographic citations) suggest that the genus Alcea, which contains roughly 60 species of flowering plants in the mallow family Malvacaeae, was originally native to Asia. Susan Bruneni asserts that they "were first mentioned in England in [the] “Grete Herbal” by John Gerard in 1597 as arriving in Britain in 1573, probably from China by way of Palestine." Ruth L. Fish references a slightly earlier date, citing it in a manuscript from 1548:

Its genaeological background is long and interesting. Its botanical name is Althea rosea, a genus of the Mallow Family, and a cousin to the exotic hibiscus of the tropics, as well as to the practical okra and cottons of the temperate zones. Its common name derives from Hocys Bengaida, a name given in Wales to the Malva benedictus, "holy mallow" of medieval Latin literature. Wedgewood, an English botanist, says that it was called "holy" because the first of the plants brought to southern Europe came from the Holy Land, to which it had been transplanted from China, its original home. Its characteristic of survival in all climates and soils had caused it to be transplanted to all parts of the civilized world during the Middle Ages, and it is mentioned as "holy-hoke," an adaptation of the Welsh name, in a British horticultural treatise of 1548.

Penelope Hobhouse dates their arrival even earlier, stating that hollyhocks were "introduced from Spain by Eleanor of Castile in 1255" (PGH 78). My history is woefully fuzzy, but it seems very plausible that they were first brought north and west by the Moors in the eighth century. As she laments, "Except for those made by the Moors in Spain, no actual garden made in the period which covers the withdrawal and conquest of the Roman empire in the fifth century until after 1500 exists today in Europe" (PGH 70). Nor, unfortunately, has there been much research by archeologists. What little we know has been drawn from copies of manuscripts and bits of pictorial evidence. Providing a tantalizing glimpse, a painting by an unknown Rhenish artist (Rhineland) c. 1410 actually depicts TWO varieties of hollyhocks in the upper right-hand corner.

History of Art - Gothic Art
http://www.all-art.org/gothic_era/08.html

Jump ahead a couple of centuries, and plant historians find hollyhocks making their way to 'The New World' in the pockets of the Puritans (PGH 257) and in the saddlebags of the Spaniards. Ruth L. Fish tracks the flowers on their way north from Mexico, heading for what is now northern New Mexico:

To the Spanish, the plant was generally known as Las Varas de San Jose, "rods (or staffs) of St. Joseph," and as such it was pictured in many early paintings of St. Joseph in southern Europe, its quality of enduring all manner of circumstances in all climates and soils typifying God's love and mercy for mankind. In this way, it came to have a very special meaning for our Spanish colonists who brought the seed from the Mother Country in the earliest years of settlement. The Spanish people have ever been lovers of flowers, and even in arid New Mexico, the doñas and their gardeners soon had flowers lining their portales and bordering their adobe walls.

Fish's account is a reminder that migration and seed dispersal are not unilateral. In terms of the North American continent, waves of invading newcomers came from a variety of different directions, often widely separated by boundaries of language, culture (history, geography and religion) and time.

Based on the history of our little yard, she is utterly correct: "The hollyhocks survived when many more tender plants could not abide the rigors of late spring and early autumn frosts, burning noon-day sun, and persistent drought; and so they became the favorites; seed was shared; and soon, as one of my aged neighbors has said, 'Everyone had hollyhocks.'" My grandfather would be so proud.