Hollyhock Ambition

Arents Cigarette Card 1895-1900"Floral beauties and language of flowers"NYPL Digital Gallery

I've always wanted huge hollyhocks so I removed the colon from the cigarette card title for this post's title.

However, I live in a shady, humid area where any althea worthy of that family name would immediately succumb to rust.  A long time ago I grew them in a sunny elsewhere. I so enjoyed having them grow taller than myself!  And then having those fat  seed pods develop...joy unbounded!

I dislike the double hollyhocks.  They look like used tissues to me...balled up wads.  I think I once saw one that had style to the extra petals but most are a puffy mess.

I'll be posting hollyhock catalog images next time.

SINGLE HOLLYHOCKS 

  Single-flowered Hollyhocks constitute a very beautiful race of hardy garden plants, and are even more decorative than are the doubles. A double Hollyhock is of course the florist's correct form, and the fuller and doubler the petals the more is it liked. I find these singles growing almost everywhere in small gardens, especially in suburban districts. Recently when taken all over the Carshalton and Beddington district I found them cropping up in little gardens everywhere, exhibiting such varied and beautiful colours that I was charmed with them. We see in strains of these three or four times the variation in colours found in the doubles. The direction in which crossing in able hands should be directed is in enlarging the flowers, still further varying the colours, and in obtaining if possible distinctly fringed edges. One variety which I thought very beautiful had flowers of a glossy claret hue edged with white. It served to show what variations and markings in these singles are possible. 

I am glad to see that seed can be purchased cheaply.  That fact probably explains why these flowers are so largely found in small gardens, although it is possible that neighbors seeing them standing up so prominently in a local garden beg seed, and thus the seeds are widely spread.  That form of selection however does not likely lead to high-class selection.

It is a good time to sow seed outdoors now, or, indeed, it may be sown outdoors any time through the end of August, the plants standing in the garden  all the winter transplanting early in the spring to fill borders, where they will flower. No plants should remain to bloom longer than a second season, as it is when standing too long in the same ground that the soil gets dry and impoverished, and the Hollyhock fungus preys upon the stems and leafage. The more branching the plants are the better, as numerous spikes of moderate height are better than are fewer very tall ones. I hope it will not be suggested that spikes of these Hollyhocks would look well at flower shows. I hope someone will take these single Hollyhocks in hand and improve them largely. There is no telling what may be ultimately evolved. Selection may do much, and intercrossing perhaps more.  (1897  The Garden: An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Gardening)

This looks to be an interesting book! 

The Social History of Flatbush