Hollyhocks in Brooklyn

Growing a flower that makes me nostalgic for somewhere else

Hollyhocks growing in a Brooklyn tree well

One of my very favorite flowers is the hollyhock, though I’ve never tried to grow it until this year. For some reason I was always too intimidated, and even this summer I bought verbascum ‘Southern Charm’ because it kind of looks like a hollyhock on a smaller scale, and because it seemed like it would be a lot easier to grow. I’m not sure if that’s true, though it’s still growing just fine and I haven’t killed it yet.

Why did I think hollyhocks were hard to grow? Whenever I see them mentioned in magazines or on episodes of Gardener’s World there’s always some kind of warning about a fungal disease called rust that hollyhocks are prone to get, which put me off. I get way too emotionally attached to my plants, and I’ve been known to let a plant casualty ruin my day. I’m trying to get better about it, though.

I also used to be too intimidated to grow biennials. I don’t know why, since it shouldn’t be overcomplicated. Sow in spring/summer, get blooms the following year. Easy enough, though maybe not so easy for the impatient. I’m trying to get better about that one, too.

Hollyhocks at Charleston House, photographed by Carolyn Carter

But it goes beyond the planting instructions, beyond the horticulture. I fell in love with hollyhocks because I loved the idea of them, and the aesthetics of them. And if you read my dream garden post you already know how I feel about them. They’re so romantically old-fashioned, they make my heart hurt. They make me nostalgic for something that I don’t even remember. Is it for my grandparents’ old garden in Illinois?

Hollyhocks were my grandma’s favorite flower. Her name was Judy, and I probably inherited a lot of my love for gardening from her, via my dad, who loved it, too, of course. I remember her garden, behind my grandparents’ farmhouse (they didn't farm, but loved living in the country), set right beside a small, wooden building with peeling paint. My grandparents said it was called a summer kitchen, and that people used to cook their food in these buildings in the 1800s so that the main house didn’t burn down.

I do remember that garden, filled with vegetables and flooded with sunlight. I’m sure there were lots of flowers, but when I was a kid I was less interested in flowers and more interested in bugs. I remember the giant black and yellow garden spiders in their giant webs (terrifying!) and I remember all of the black swallowtail caterpillars crawling on the dill plants so clearly that the scent of dill still makes me think of them. But I don’t remember hollyhocks.

Could it be Galena that I’m thinking of? Galena—I’ve mentioned it before—is a tiny town tucked into the northwest corner of Illinois, with Civil War-era mansions and cottages built into the hills above the Galena River. My other grandparents lived there, and we’d visit Galena more often than anywhere else, which was fine by me since I adored it. My sisters and I had free rein to explore the town on foot, and it was on those walks that I learned to love history and to begin to see it as more than just a boring subject to study in class.

I wish I had my copy of Historic Galena: Yesterday and Today with me, but it’s in a storage unit somewhere. I stole this photo off Ebay a while back

At one of the little gift shops in town (I think it was at the Dowling House, Galena’s oldest house, dating back to 1826, which probably doesn’t sound all that old to a lot of you, but to an American from the Midwest, it’s ancient!) I bought this little book about Galena’s history. It was published in 1939 and was charmingly dated in the best of ways, which was what drew me to it. I especially loved a poem in it about the hollyhocks of Galena, probably because it reminded me of the L.M. Montgomery books I was devouring at that time. It was sentimental and sweet. And soothing to imagine a time when flowers meant so much to people that they wrote poems about them and saw them as proud symbols of towns.

All the same, I don’t remember the hollyhocks in Galena, either. But I do look at that photo below the poem (you kind of have to squint) and wonder if it was taken on the hill above my grandparents’ house on Franklin Street. We used to play on that hill all the time. In the winter we’d sled down it, and in the summer we’d trudge up to go visit my cousins, who lived up at the top. Were there still self-seeded hollyhocks growing there in the 1980s and ‘90s? I wish I could remember.

Last year I spend a lot of time on Zillow dreaming, looking up houses all over the country. Most of them weren’t practical. We didn’t know where we were going so I’d look in places we would probably never move to, like Galena. It wouldn’t make any sense to move there, I know, and I think I was mostly looking at houses as suitable backdrops for a dream garden. The houses I liked best were old, and the house I liked the very best was a tiny Cotswolds-y cottage with honey-colored stone walls, just perfect for a cottage garden, just begging for hollyhocks to climb alongside it.

But we ended up in Brooklyn instead, and I didn’t consider growing hollyhocks until I saw some growing in a trash-covered tree well on a downtown street. If they can grow there, why can’t they grow in my garden? So I’m determined to grow them. I’ve already sown seeds last month, and the plants are pretty big already. I probably should transplant them soon into grow bags, because I’ve read that the taproots get long, and I think the plants will be happier to grow in their final homes, with lots more room.

But, again, it’s hard to be patient. One of the things I love best about gardening is that it teaches me patience, but, all the same, I wish I could jump ahead to summer and see a row of hollyhocks growing against the painted walls of the terrace. Because even though I do think that hollyhocks can look just as romantic and nostalgic here as much as anywhere else, I really would like to see it for myself.