One of my favorite childhood activities was making dollies from inverted hollyhock blossoms in my grandmother’s garden. The blossom becomes the skirt of the doll; the body and head come from imagination or whatever’s available by scrounging the garden, lawn, orchard, or driveway. Unripe blackberries made great bodies as did small native strawberries and small dropped peaches and apples. Sometimes the head was a single Cosmos blossom; other times the head disappeared under a flower bonnet of sweet peas.

When I was seven, our house burned to the ground. We lost everything: our beds, books, clothes, shoes, and toys. We lived with my Quaker grandmother in her third-floor apartment while the house was rebuilt. She allowed me to eat parsley from her garden (after I learned not to squash her parsleyworms, the caterpillar of black swallowtail butterflies), and to pick single hollyhocks.

Hollyhocks still rank among my favorite flowers. I bought seeds of two kinds Alcea rosea and A. fificolia as “old fashioned single hollyhocks.” Both form low rosettes of ground-hugging leaves the first year from seed. Flower spikes emerge the second year.

The leaves of A. fificolia resemble hands or maple leaves on the flower spike while Alcea rosea retains the same rounded, scalloped leaves of the rosettes; foliage of both species are covered with fine hairs. A. fificolia is a grayer green and slightly hairier. Deer detest the foliage.

In my stony, bony, heavy clay ground, I double dug the soil, amending it profusely with composted cow manure and building caches of the stones, before the seeds were planted.

Double digging is an English invention to promote aerobic exercise and enrich the soil. You dig and remove the soil to a depth of one spade; loosen the sub soil to a depth of another spade and enrich with compost, then replace the first soil on top. Ten or fifteen years amending the soil by layering composted cow manure and mulch over all the beds has produced a soil friable enough to support hollyhock seeds sown by chipmunks and chickadees. Some years, they plant more than I do. In sandy soil, hollyhock seeds planted early in a spring garden sometimes will bloom late in the first year.

Alcea rosea tends to bloom in the dark reds, burgundies, mahoganies, true reds, deep pinks, and “black” (really very dark red). It also blooms first and is a true biennial in my garden, with a first- year rosette hugging the ground and a second year bloom stalk of flowers. The black one has blossoms twice the diameter of the others, and is the least robust to self-perpetuate, so I have to reseed it myself. Some have lighter colors of pale yellow or white in the center. These pale centers are called “eyes,” and they appear to watch over the garden and house.

Fificolia has a paler palette of sorbet colors: strawberry, raspberry, peach, apricot, cantaloupe, lavender, creamy lemon and white. Some flowers have an inner ruffle, a second layer of petals in a different hue. Some are so pale they can be distinguished from pure white only at high noon. Fificolia tends to return to bloom for two or three years if the stalks are cut to ground level before the seeds set in round rolls resembling donuts.

When frost hits, hollyhock seed rolls shatter and forests of seedlings spring up to be culled. These seedlings are mostly Alcea rosea, which will bear the red flowers. Many seeds retain the same color as the parent plant.

One year, I confess to being the Martha Stewart of hollyhocks. I punched holes in my old business cards, threaded strings, and labeled the plants with the most desirable colors. In the fall, I collected seeds of the labeled plants, destroyed the old bed, and reseeded with the darker colors nearer the house fading into the paler colors in the distance. It gave a false sense of depth to the bed.

That was the year I reread the work of Gertrude Jekyll, the famous 19th century British garden designer, several times to grasp her concept of color and order in a perennial bed. After a hundred years, Jeykll’s advice about drifts and sweeps of colors still rings true.

In wet years, in full sun, hollyhocks reach nine feet with multiple flower stalks, beginning to bloom before the Fourth of July and continuing to Labor Day. Following Jekyll’s admonition that the bed depth is two thirds the height, a six foot wide bed is a minimum for hollyhocks. My largest perennial garden is the leach field for our septic system, so hollyhocks add height on the edges.

Mature blossoming hollyhocks attract bumblebees, lady bugs, hoverflies, butterflies, chickadees, humming birds, nuthatches, and chipmunks. They offer height and a wide a palette of colors. They bring a touch of nostalgia. They contain no known noxious toxins, so they make great dolls or imaginary ice cream for tea parties. Plant hollyhocks and enjoy!

By Cheryl Grabe, Master Gardener