Hollyhock: How to grow, care and plant hollyhocks | House & Garden

The Amazons of the summer border, hollyhocks tower on 1.5 to 2.5-metre stems from June to August. Their funnel-shaped blooms, which open in shades of ivory, lemon, pink, red, and plum, can often be seen peeping over a garden wall, basking in the sun. Bumblebees love to sup the nectar, and, as they do, become covered in a dusting of the flowers’ plentiful creamy pollen.

These quintessential English cottage garden plants are in fact forms of a cultigen from Turkey – Alcea rosea – which had arrived in Britain by the fifteenth century. It’s said that Eleanor of Castile, the first wife of Edward I, brought hollyhock seeds back from Palestine much earlier, in the thirteenth century, having accompanied Edward there in the Crusades. The name hollyhock stems from the Anglo-Saxon holi (referring to the Holy Land) and hoc (mallow).

The hollyhock genus Alcea grows wild from the Mediterranean to Central Asia and comprises 82 species. Belonging to the mallow family, they are similar in make-up and appearance to lavatera, hibiscus, and of course marsh mallow (Althaea officinalis), the root of which was used by the ancient Egyptians to make restorative sweets.

By the seventeenth century, hollyhocks were essential garden plants and continued to be for three hundred years. Charles Darwin was obsessed with them and their natural process of hybridisation, and today they still grow in the garden of Down House, where he lived and worked. They fell out of fashion when they were hit by the fungal disease rust in the late nineteenth century. But now that we know how to prevent and reduce it, these wonderful statuesque plants are enjoying a resurgence in popularity.

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The most widely available hollyhocks bear double flowers that are