For a brief shining moment in mid-June my hollyhocks rivaled Childe Hassam’s celebrated watercolors of Celia Thaxter’s garden on Appledore, one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire where she entertained and beguiled the leading American musicians and painters of her day and documented the growing of her beloved flowers in what Alan Lacy called a mastery of English prose, My Island Garden (Houghton Mifflin, 1894). I am beguiling my summer with a re-reading of this classic which was re-issued in 1988.
One of the most charming pictures she drew was of the music room (bare wooden floors with scattered small rugs of “warm green moss”) that opened onto the “piazza” above the flower beds: “The shelves of the tall mantel are splendid with massed Nasturtiums like a blazing torch, beginning with the palest yellow, almost white, and piled through every deepening shade of gold, orange, scarlet, crimson, to the blackest red; all along the tops of the low bookcases burn the fires of Marigolds, Coreopsis, large flowers of the velvet single Dahlias in yellow, flame, and scarlet of many shades, masses of pure gold summer Chrysanthemums, and many more – ”
Unfortunately, here in my world, the nasturtiums, which I love for their capers as well as the pungent blossoms, succumbed early on to an infestation of rabbits (a story in itself), and the hollyhocks after their initial effusion have been overtaken by the inevitable orange rust that speckles their leaves from bottom to top.
I started the “Outhouse” series (irresistible since we have one, a relic now but in use before we put the indoor plumbing in back in the late ’80’s) from seed and grew it for a year before it yielded its biennial flower. They take up a lot of space, one whole season without flowers, and then must be cut down and their large woody stalks disposed of, leaving a great gap. A lot of trouble for a brief display and I see why this old-fashioned flower has fallen out of favor. And yet . . .
Hollyhock dolls!