Yes, I know that the feature photo isn’t a Hollyhock, but we’ll get to that…
Are Hollyhocks an old-fashioned flower? Maybe it just seems that way because they figure prominently in my memories from my favorite neighborhood of my childhood. The walkway to the back door of my house was lined with Hollyhocks. They were much taller than me and loaded with flowers. All the time, or just some of the time? They are always present in my memories of those days, and for years they were one of the few flowers I knew the name of on sight. I saw one the other day when I visited a friend in Duxbury, so I took a picture. It was exactly as I remembered them to be. Dark pink, single flowers, and we, or maybe it was just me, loved to pick the buds and smush them in my fingers, covering myself with yellow powder. Destroying new flowers in the process, but that didn’t occur to my five-year-old self.
I had forgotten about the picture I had taken only a few days before until I saw the Hollyhocks, lots of them, in Nantucket. Fancy ones. They seemed ruffled, or double flowered. And the yellow ones were lined up so tightly on the stalk that I didn’t recognize them as Hollyhocks until I spoke with another admirer. If I have come home in search of my childhood I have certainly found it around every bend in the road, so to speak…
The feature flower is a total mystery to me. The colors are so beautiful! And up close I see the tiny little flowers beginning to open. But what is it? Am I the only one in the dark?
A Snowbird's Life Through the Lens 