Published: June 18, 2006 09:27 pm         

The Off Season: Accidental beauty of hollyhocks a testament to persistence

In the late evening glimmer of a falling June sun, I sat with my thumbs tucked under my chin and watched a hummingbird dash between a feeder under a backyard pine to a stand of deep red hollyhocks that grow on a hillside near our barn.

The birds have always fascinated me, but my life with them came when we first moved to this house. The flowers, however, are a thing from the distant past. I have not outgrown hollyhocks, nor do I wish to.

Earlier this spring I was scrounging through the odds and ends of an unintentional collection on a garage shelf. Nestled among the unmatched gloves, the cans of forgotten paint and a few old garden tools sat a rusting coffee can, the homely reposit of a sack labeled with my mom’s elegant handwriting. “Phyllis’ hollyhock seeds,” it read.

Smiling, I took the seeds to a then-bare spot of soil on the hillside I’ve gradually carved from our woods, dropped them into the red-brown dirt as if sowing grass, sloshed a half-can of water across the work, and walked away.

Within a few weeks I could see the pale green fans of the tiny plants grabbing the air for sunlight. Phyllis, one of Mom’s oldest and dearest friends, has been gone for years now, but part of her is still alive and reaching out of the soil.

The hollyhock has never been a highly respected flower. Its long, slender stems came in handy over the years to help hide outhouses and henhouses, junked cars and trash pits. Hollyhocks were easy to grow, but easier to neglect. Most often, they are biennial, planted one year to flower the next.

Although I neatly trim around my gangs of plants, I have rarely planted or replanted our hollyhocks. Our best stands simply appeared where I had thrown the splotched and bug-eaten carcasses I had cut out of a front-yard flowerbed. Their accidental beauty is a testament to the persistence of nature.

From what I’ve read, hollyhocks (scientific name Athaea rosea) first came to America from China and were once eaten as a pot herb. Its flowers still are used by some as medicines, specifically for chest complaints. Hollyhocks also are used for making dyes, their blooms gathered in July or August and dried in thin layers on trays in the sun.

I suppose that I most remember the pink and crimson blooms growing in my Grandma Blanche’s flower garden. She always sprinkled hollyhocks among her rhubarb and irises, and often I wandered in bare feet to her back step and caught her leaning amid her flowers pulling weeds and snipping blooms. She wasn’t very tall and her head would pop up amidst the hollyhocks, her reddened, chubby face framed in the color of the flowers, not unlike a painting I once saw at T.C. Steele’s House of the Singing Winds near Nashville.

Despite the apparent lack of respect, the hollyhock has been cultivated. A good many varieties exist, among them a mixture of white, red, pink and yellow blooms called Indian Spring. Other variations are called Summer Carnival and Rugosa; I have no idea what our hollyhocks are called.

My wife has spent a life with hollyhocks, too. Her Grandma Ruth first showed her how to make hollyhock dolls from the flowers when she was a girl still wearing cowboy boots and horn-rimmed glasses and missing a few front teeth. The dolls were intricate sculptures that sat alongside other dolls made of corn tassels and that art was proof that often the most treasured playthings are short-lived but long remembered. My children can claim that in a digital age of special effects and computer animation, they saw their mother sitting at our old oak kitchen table carefully folding and wrapping hollyhock blooms into frail families that lasted just a day or two.

I am confident that someday my wife will get a book about her grandmother and those flowers into print. I am as equally confident that we are headed to a time when the things of the past, whether they be front-porch rockers, old-time religion or playthings made from flowers, will be important to us again. Perhaps as a culture we will someday decide to slow down.

In the heat of southern California, the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright was so impressed with the lowly hollyhock that he built a magnificent house based on the flower’s basic structure. Wright believed in the “organic house,” that nature’s designing power was superior to that of man.

For as much as I would like to say that my yard and garden are my own creations, like Wright, I know better. My best flowers are those accidental hollyhocks, cultivated, not with my hands, but by those of a subtle and awesome power.

Mike Lunsford can be reached by e-mail at hickory913@aol.com, or through regular mail c/o The Tribune-Star, PO Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.