Mallow Wild Flowers

Swamp Rose-mallow; Mallow Rose (Hibiscus Moscheutos). This plant produces very large, clear rose pink flowers. Sometimes you'll find it with white flowers though, that have a crimson red center. The flowers are four to seven inches wide. The plant itself grows from four to seven feet tall, it's stout with a perennial root. The leaves are three to seven inches long and tend to have a tapering egg shape. There's a dense, white down on the underside.

This wild flower likes to live in brackish marshes, riversides, lake shores, saline

situations. It flowers from August to September and can grow from Massachusetts to the Gulf of Mexico, westward to Louisiana.

Stately ranks of these magnificent flowers, growing among the tall sedges and "cat-tails" of the marshes, make the most insensate traveller exclaim at their amazing loveliness. To reach them one must don rubber boots and risk sudden seats in the slippery ooze; nevertheless, with spade in hand to give one support, it is well worth while to seek them out and dig up some roots to transplant to the garden. Here, strange to say, without salt soil or more water than the average garden receives from showers and hose, this handsomest of our wild flowers soon makes itself delightfully at home under cultivation. Such good, deep earth, well enriched and moistened, as the hollyhock thrives in, suits it perfectly.

Only its cousin the hollyhock, a native of China, can vie with the rose-mallow's decorative splendor among the shrubbery; and the Rose of China (Hibiscus Rosa-Sinensis), eclipse it in the beauty of the individual blossom. This latter flower, whose superb scarlet corolla stains black, is was once used by the Chinese married women, it is said, to discolor their teeth; and in the West Indies it was used for shoe polish!

Marsh Mallow (Althaea officinalis), a name frequently misapplied to the Swamp Rose-mallow, is properly given to a much smaller pink flower, measuring only an inch and a half across at the most, and a far rarer one, being a naturalized immigrant from Europe found only in the salt marshes from the Massachusetts coast to New York. It is also known as Wymote. This is a bushy, leafy plant, two to four feet high, and covered with velvety down as a protection against the clogging of its pores by the moisture arising from its wet retreats. Plants that live in swamps must "perspire" freely and keep their pores open. The Marsh Mallow's thick roots are considered medicinal.

There's also a Desert Mallow which grows well in the hot regions of Texas, Southern New Mexico and Arizona. It has small peach flowers and stands up wonderful to intense heat and sun.