Category — Heirloom plants

OK. If you read the first part of this post, now you know some of the African Queen’s family. But family, while always first, may not be the most urgent force in some relationships.

What you need to know is this: African Queen lilies are beautiful, and they smell like heaven. (“They smell like melon,” a friend of mine said. Not to me. But I get the fruitiness. There’s something fresh and earthy in the sweetness.)

Intoxication is only one of African Queen’s virtues. She has practical qualities as well. African Queen blooms in semishade, although the sunnier that semishade is, the more flowers you tend to get. They bloom for weeks, since each stem has at least a few buds, which open one at a time and last awhile. They grew like this for me in pots, even while wildfires filled our sky with smoke that was like cloudy weather–we didn’t see the sun (or much of anything) for three weeks.

Mine showed variations this year: you can see the deep purple outline on the anthers. (They might have had this variation before, but I didn’t have them propped up in a place where it was easy to see it.)

And then there are the variations through the day, as the light changes.

And the variations of the lilies as they age: the coloring changes, and they go from “please pollinate me” to slaked sated blooms that develop fat, incandescent seed pods.

If you want your bulbs to get bigger and produce more blooms, you should really deadhead the pods. But I keep a couple of the fattest, nicest-looking ones on. Partly because I want to try my hand at lily seeds and see what I can get. (So far I’ve managed to kill off my lily seedlings while they still looked like blades of grass. But hope springs eternal. And, after all, Debras got pretty good mileage out of one seedling.)

But a secret reason I keep the seed pods on is that I like the way they look.

There’s a secret reason I chose African Queen, too. I knew I wanted an orange trumpet lily. (I didn’t know yet that the more correct term for these trumpet/L. henryii crosses is Aurelian lily.)

But why did I choose African Queen, instead of Copper King or Anaconda? Because I saw the movie “The African Queen” at a film festival with my high school boyfriend, who was often more generous to me than I deserved. And I loved the film. And even though I haven’t seen it in years, I still do. Thus are garden decisions made.

But I do make garden decisions based on logic sometimes. For instance, here’s my opinion about lily bulbs: buy expensive ones.

I don’t mean expensive strains, particularly. But when I buy lily bulbs from less expensive providers, they (the bulbs, not the providers–although, now I come to think of it, I haven’t met the providers in person) are smaller and drier and have a tendency to fall apart. I plant them with hopes, but I tend not to see lilies in the growing season. Sometimes I don’t even see lily foliage.

Since lily bulbs (unlike most other types) are never really dormant, they are more sensitive to shipping conditions that don’t bother other bulbs. My theory is that the larger, more expensive bulb grades do better in storage and shipping just because they are bigger: they have more moisture and nutrients to draw on during the stressful period out of the ground. It might also be true that the more expensive bulb places know more about lilies and take better care of their bulbs.

I’m a little afraid to venture into the world of lily specialists. I’ve already got a serious bulb habit to support. But expensive and frustrating as they can be, there is just nothing like lilies. And if I grow the right varieties, I can have lilies in bloom for a lot of the summer…

References:

F.F. Rockwell and Esther C. Grayson and Jan de Graaff, The Complete Book of Lilies, Doubleday & Co., 1961

Jan de Graaff and Edward Hyams, Lilies, Funk & Wagnalls, 1968

Places to get African Queen:

Brent & Becky’s

Places to get Copper King:

Old House Gardens

It turns out I know less about trumpet lilies than I thought.

I mean, I’ve grown  four or five varieties successfully, most in containers. Although they were often not successful enough to bloom for more than one year, or to survive a transplant.

But beautiful fragrant ‘African Queen’ has bloomed so obligingly for me for the last three years. A totally delicious flower. I wanted to meet her family.

As families often are, it was more complicated than I’d imagined.

But first, let’s take a look at one of the reasons why lilies are such good value, even if they flower only once.

The bird-beak-like buds of African Queen offer beautiful color and suspense (when will they start opening?) for at least a week before the blooms (even in hot weather). They are so long, it’s hard to fit one in a camera frame.

OK. Now a little more about how this beautiful flower came into being.

Lilium henryii is the source of the orange color in the line of trumpet lilies that includes African Queen, Copper King, and the selection called Anaconda.

The other side of the family is a Chinese trumpet lily that emigrated to France. E. Debras, a plant-breeder in Orleans, took pollen from L. henryii and dusted it on that species trumpet lily, Lilium sargentiae.

Alas, the marriage proved infertile. But Debras was persistent; year after year he made the cross, and years later (in 1925) he finally got two viable seeds. One seedling died; the other went on to become the founder of a whole new dynasty. He named it L. x Aurelianense, after his town of Orleans.

So I finally found out what an Aurelian lily really is! Later in the century, Oregon Bulb Farms had a massive breeding program involving Aurelian lilies, trumpet lilies, and L. henryii. This created the first yellow Aurelian, ‘Golden Clarion’. And went on to come up with the African Queen strain, the first orange trumpets: African Queen, Copper King, and Anaconda.

Next post: African Queen: Secret Passions.

References:

F.F. Rockwell and Esther C. Grayson and Jan de Graaff, The Complete Book of Lilies, Doubleday & Co., 1961

Jan de Graaff and Edward Hyams, Lilies, Funk & Wagnalls, 1968

Edward Austin McRae, Lilies, Timber Press, 1998

Brent and Becky’s Bulbs summer-flowering bulbs catalogue, 2008 (they are also my source of African Queen lilies)

This flower may look very like the one in my last post.

But wait. Check out the leaves. This is a fig-leafed hollyhock, a different variety from all the hollyhocks we have discussed before.

Then check out the edges of the flowers: they’re pinked. Just another of the mutations hollyhocks seem to specialize in.

This plant is probably some hybrid of Alcea ficifolia (fig-leafed hollyhock) and Alcea rosea (all the other hollyhocks we’ve been looking at in this series). I’ve never grown the species version of Alcea ficifolia, but two sources tell me it has pale yellow flowers. (Maybe Chater used some ficifolia blood in the flower that became ‘Peaches ‘n’ Dreams’.)

Since hollyhocks seem to be given to variation, a lot of interbreeding has probably gone on over the years, with human help or without it. (Remember the bees I talked about a couple of posts ago? They are the ones who are responsible for most of the hollyhock breeding down the centuries.) Wuv’n Acres has a Black Cherry fig-leafed hollyhock, plus a multicolored mix of fig-leafed hollyhocks called ‘Happy Lights’. Select Seeds also carries ‘Happy Lights’, among other hollyhocks which include another species, Alcea rugosa.

Alcea rugosa is rumored to be a longer-lived perennial than the rosea types. (It’s also rumored to be from Russia, and since I read about this in the Plant Delights catalogue as well as another source, I’m willing to accept that. Provisionally.) Presumably it has wrinkled leaves, since that’s what ‘rugosa’ means. According to Plant Delights, it’s 6-7 feet tall, has typical Alcea rosea foliage, and blooms “all summer with large 4-inch single buttery-yellow flowers.” It’s also supposed to be more disease-resistant than other varieties.

The last species I’ve heard of is Alcea setosa, another one with yellow blooms. I don’t know of any more detailed descriptions or pictures of this type. Just the name and the yellow flowers.

All right. These are little-known varieties of hollyhocks (and you might rightly say that, after reading this, you still know very little about them).

What are the little-known uses of hollyhocks? I’ve already discussed how hollyhocks have been used for food and medicine. But did you know they were once under consideration as a fiber crop plant?

In 1821, 280 acres of land near Flint (England) were sown with hollyhocks, in order to use the fiber of stems like hemp or flax. Since cotton was very fashionable as dress material in the early 1800s, it was a major import crop for England at that time. I’d guess that this was an attempt to produce fiber locally and reduce dependency on cotton shipments from India and the southern U.S. Something along the lines of modern attempts at reducing dependency on foreign oil by producing local power.

In fact, hollyhocks are related to cotton (Gossypium herbaceum), though, of course, we get cotton from the fluffy innards of the seedpods, not from the stalks of the plant.

In any case, hollyhock fiber was not a success with 1821 technology. It might be possible today, given that we have created fibers out of bamboo and wood. Maybe it’ll be the next designer material.

The Great Hollyhock Experiment wasn’t entirely futile. In the process, the growers discovered that hollyhock flowers produced a blue dye, “as good as indigo”—the best blue dye at the time. Since indigo requires a lot of time-consuming and smelly processing (hint: large fermenting vats are involved), I was a little surprised that nobody followed up on the possibilities of dyeing with hollyhock flowers, which would not have needed nearly so much processing. Especially since indigo was another one of the big cash crops of the era. (It was grown in the southern U.S. on big plantations that depended on slave labor, much like cotton, tobacco, and rice.)

Maybe the experimenters were so discouraged and discredited that they didn’t have the means or energy to pursue it further. Maybe hollyhock flower dye really wasn’t as good as indigo. We’ll probably never know.

We humans have helped hollyhocks grow and travel, and give them a multitude of names and uses. But hollyhocks are clearly capable of changing, spreading, and thriving without us.

References:

Wuv’n Acres

Alice M. Coats, Flowers and Their Histories, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1956, 1968

Plant Delights catalogue, spring 2009

Hollyhock seed and plant sources:

JL Hudson

Jung’s Seed

Loghouse Plants

Morrison Home and Garden

Plant Delights Nursery

Select Seeds

Thompson & Morgan

Bysmalow, hock, hock-holler, hollek, hollinhocke, holy hoke. Passe-rose, Rose tremiere, Stockrosen. Alcea vossa, Malva rosa, Rosa di mare. Gulhatem cic. (With apologies for missing diacritics.)

Not to mention Outlandish Rose or Rosa Ultramarina.

When a plant has a lot of names, it’s a good sign that it’s traveled a bit, and met a lot of people.

I haven’t found much about the history of hollyhocks in France, Germany, and Turkey, the places where the names at the beginning of this post come from. Or in the Middle East, India, and China. Maureen Gilmer tells a story of how Priscilla, a slave in 1830s U.S., took seeds from her plantation slave quarters to the Cherokee chief she was sold to. Priscilla was eventually freed, ran an inn, and grew the hollyhocks there. In 1950, seed from those hollyhocks was sent to Oklahoma, where the Cherokees had been forced to migrate.

Hollyhocks may have started out as plants for the wealthy, shown in Chinese art and (much later) in the walled gardens of the rich. But it wasn’t long before the innate hardiness of hollyhocks, and the large supplies of seed they provide, brought them into the working classes.

Many people now associate the hollyhock with barns and barn walls, rather than walled gardens. Barns, walls, and fences are all good, easy supports for hollyhocks, and save gardeners from tedious staking. As time went on, hollyhocks acquired an even more plebian use. Outhouses were commonly screened by hollyhocks in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ladies of delicate sensibilities would ask to see the hollyhocks in the same way that some women today ask for a powder room, though they don’t have any plans to powder their hair.

How did hollyhocks get from the gardens of the wealthy to the gardens of ordinary folks? It’s the old story: the gardeners who actually did the work in the walled gardens of the wealthy took home seeds and cuttings; what they grew on was passed along to friends, family, and neighbors, and in a generation or two what was a plant for the wealthy becomes a denizen of the cottage garden. Since hollyhocks exchange their pollen pretty freely, no doubt many of these gardeners helped them along to new colors and forms.

Cottage gardens, by the way, were (and still are) the sources of prize-winning, groundbreaking breeding in plants, primroses and tulips being only two examples. I would guess for the harder-pressed cottage gardeners who needed the food from their gardens to eke out meager wages, cottage gardens also served as a lab for plants that would grow most easily, without a lot of care. Hollyhocks may have figured in both the breeding and the easy-care categories-with the added bonus of being useful for medicine and cooking should the need arise. But probably they were mostly grown for their beauty.

You can see how, by selection over generations, this ‘Crème de Cassis’ hollyhock (the name means cream of blackcurrant) could have evolved from the rose hollyhock at top. And gone on to morph into hollyhock nigra.

Next post: Hollyhocks: the new fiber?

References:

Mrs. C. F. Leyel, Officier de l’Academie Francaise, Fellow of the Royal Institute, Elixirs of Life, first pub. 1948 Faber and Faber London. pb reprint 1987

Alice M. Coats, Flowers and Their Histories, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1956, 1968

Maureen Gilmer, “Hollyhocks, an American Garden Staple”

Wuv’n Acres http://www.wuvie.net/hockwhich.htm

The Holihock disdains the common size
Of Herbs, and like a tree do’s proudly rise,
Proud she appears, but try her, and you’ll find
No plant more mild, or friendly to mankind
She gently all obstructions doth unbind.

Abraham Cowley

Every part of a hollyhock is worth looking at, from the first sprouting leaves to their full abundance; from the rising stalk to the buds; from the opened flower to the fat, satisfyingly seed-packed pod.

This single, pale-pink hollyhock is one of the simplest I grow. Maybe because of that, I never get tired of it, though (as is the sad way of human beings) I tend to take it for granted just because it is so trouble-free and reliable.

But the pale, illuminated opening buds are as fine a flower as you’ll find anywhere.

I start my hollyhocks in the fall, since they seem to take awhile to germinate. (This is true of most perennials; probably a survival mechanism. Annuals, which have to grow from seed every year, seem to be in more of a hurry to sprout.)

In my area, starting seeds in fall means they are more likely to stay moist all the time and not fry. It’s just easier than hovering over the seeds with a watering can, and, to be honest, it’s a lot easier than slapping myself on the brow because I’ve just shriveled yet another seedling from forgetting to water for one day.

By starting in the fall, I get a full-sized plant the next blooming season. I’m not sure how this would pan out in colder areas (I’m in zone 8, which means we get freezes, but only rarely a hard frost.) Hollyhocks are hardy plants, so it seems to me that it could work to plant seed in late summer or early fall, even in cold areas. As Gerard said hundreds of years ago, ” The second yeere after they are sowne they bring forth their floures…” Fall sowing means that the second year comes more quickly.

If you start a hollyhock in spring, it may not be fully ready to bloom until late that season. You may even have to wait until the following year. But it will be worth it!

Whenever I see a flower with a bee in it now, I think of Barbee’s blog–her avatar is a pink mallow-looking flower (Zebrina?) with a large bee right in the middle of it. A gardening friend of mine says that she finds bees passed out in her hollyhocks, drunk with nectar. This one was only visiting, and if it passed out, it did it discreetly.

Hollyhocks also attract butterflies and hummingbirds, so they’re good for all of these flying pollinating creatures whose habitats humans are eroding. So hollyhocks can be a tiny way to help some of the mess we’ve made, and give ourselves pleasure at the same time. If we could think of more things like that, the world would be a better place.

One year, this single pink hollyhock grew something like nine feet tall, in a container. (Since it was in a pot, it’s hard to say exactly, but it towered over a one-story building by at least a foot.) While I thought that was pretty impressive, it was apparently tiny in comparison to some. The 1982 Guiness Book of World Records is said to boast of a 24-foot, 3-inch hollyhock grown in 1961 by W.P. Walshe of Eastbourne, Sussex, England. There’s no photo, though.

Though it might not have reached the heights of some, my single pink hollyhock does tend to grow taller than the others; it’s always one of the most enthusiastic of my hollyhocks, and the one that keeps on blooming at the end of its stalk, even when the others are long gone.

All my hollyhocks are container-planted (though I give them some pretty serious containers), and they don’t get special treatment. I foliar feed them once every week or two, and give them dry fertilizer a few times a year. They grow tall and strong, and if they get enough sun, they bloom. Hollyhocks are so tough that they can grow under black walnut trees. Black walnuts give off juglone, a toxic substance which usually kills off the other plants in its root range. Deer don’t seem to like hollyhocks, either. That makes them stellar plants for tough situations.

Hollyhock rust (caused by a fungus, Puccinia malvacearum) seems to come on just after the blooms really get going. I’m not sure of the reason for this, and I’m uninclined to hunt around for one. Because hollyhock rust has never seemed to hurt any of my plants. True, it looks less than glorious. But so do the rest of us, at times.

Some gardeners take off the first two leaves of older plants when they return in spring; the theory is that this reduces the number of fungus spores that have overwintered in the plant. Others spray with lime sulfur to keep it from spreading. But, apparently, there is no cure for the disease.

While I like a prosperous-looking garden as well as the next one, I just can’t get worked up over imperfections that aren’t actually harmful to the plants. Death happens. It’s a part of nature. A garden should reflect that. That’s my feeling, anyway, and I understand that that’s also a principle of Japanese gardening. Most of the Japanese gardens I’ve seen are a lot neater than mine, though.

Meanwhile, I take my usual childish pleasure in the round fat seedpods, which don’t remind me of cheeses, but do seem to hearken back to some ancient memory, some old shape of the mind, having to do with fullness, satisfaction, and the entrance into another world.

References:

Thompson & Morgan

Wuv’n Acres