A cottage garden just wouldn’t be a cottage garden without a row of tall, cheerful hollyhock spires brightening up a back fence, adding a splash of colour to a sunny corner or softening a homely brick wall. Most of us associate this quintessentially ‘country’ flower with the very definition of the Victorian or Edwardian cottage garden. But our passion for the hollyhock dates back just a bit further than the last two centuries – try 60,000 years.
Herbalism, the ancient art of healing with plants, can be traced back to a Neanderthal gravesite in Shanidar, Iraq. The pollen grains scattered over the graves revealed that hollyhocks were being used as both healing and ritual burial plants by our pre-historic ancestors. In fact, hollyhocks are members of one of the most useful plant families we have: mallows. This family has many illustrious members including the cotton plant, just one of a number of fiber producing mallows. Even hollyhocks, with their woody stems, were used to produce a fabric similar to hemp. One legend says Mohammed was so pleased with his bed sheets made from hollyhocks that he miraculously transformed the plants into (presumably higher status) geraniums.
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August 2005
Hollyhock |
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But it was the highly prized healing properties of hollyhocks and it’s cousins that kept these flowers in the herbalist’s repertoire for millennia. In Culpeper’s great 1652 herbal, The English Physician, the many uses of mallows included “Coughs, Shortness of Breath, Wheesing, Excoriation of the Guts, Ruptures, Cramp, Convulsions, the King’s Evil, Kernels, Chin-cough [whooping cough], Wounds, Bruises, Falls, Blows, Muscles, Morphew [a skin eruption], Sun-burning.” Five hundred years earlier, rubbing hollyhock seeds between your palms could help prevent burns during criminal proceedings involving a trial by fire.
If these aren’t virtues enough, there’s the fact that nearly all mallows are edible. These plants produce a substance called mucopolysaccharides or, more simply, ‘slimy starchy-sugars’. It’s what gives okra-based ‘gumbo’ it’s flavour and it’s the source of the original marshmallow’s sticky sweetness. Add to the list that hollyhocks produce an excellent blue dye, and you’ve got a plant that seems limitless in its usefulness.
As the cottage garden evolved from neighborhood pharmacy to landscaping style, hollyhocks have maintained their right to a chunk of the garden real estate. Having endeared themselves as helpful healers, they endure as cheerful friends.
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