Black Hock

Day 285: Hollyhocks...I think it's possible that this old-fashioned garden plant may have seeded my interest in botany. My grandmother had them in her garden (or more properly, in the alley behind her house), and as much as I loved their towering height and spectacular colours, it was their seed pods which truly fascinated me as a very young child. I'm sure many subsequent generations of Hollyhocks germinated from the seed I picked out one by one to examine, scattering them and a spoor of spent husks on the dry Eastern Washington soil. Their penchant for sticking to my socks and other clothing taught me about seed transport before I understood its significance; I was intrigued by how each seed was locked to the one beside it by the hooks around its outer margins (a similar observation of cockleburs led to George de Mestral's development of Velcro).

My grandmother's 'hocks were all singles and thus became my mental holotype for the genus. No doubles for me! Those ruffly things were an insult to real Hollyhocks, show-offs whose flamboyance couldn't contest with the pure, simple beauty of the traditional flower's open face. When it came time to put them in my own garden, singles were difficult to find in catalogs, but when I did find them, they were only available in black, a bonus as far as I was concerned. They were one of the first plants I put in when I bought my home thirty years ago. I seeded them against the south-facing wall of the house, and there they have continued to provide me with joy on an annual basis.