Here, strange to say, without
salt soil or more water than the average garden receives from
showers and hose, this handsomest of our wild flowers soon makes
itself delightfully at home under cultivation. Such good, deep
earth, well enriched and moistened, as the hollyhock thrives in,
suits it perfectly. Now we have a better opportunity to note how
the bees suck the five nectaries at the base of the petals and
collect the abundant pollen of the newly opened flowers, which
they perforce transfer to the five button-shaped stigmas
intentionally impeding the entrance to older blossoms. Only its
cousin the hollyhock, a native of China, can vie with the
rose-mallow's decorative splendor among the shrubbery; and the
ROSE OF CHINA (Hibiscus Rosa-Sinensis), cultivated in greenhouses
here, eclipse it in the beauty of the individual blossom. This
latter flower, whose superb scarlet corolla stains black, is
employed by the Chinese married women, it is said, to discolor
their teeth; but in the West Indies it sinks to even greater
ignominy as a dauber for blacking shoes!
MARSH MALLOW (Althaea officinalis), a name frequently misapplied
to the swamp rose-mallow, is properly given to a much smaller
pink flower, measuring only an inch and a half across at the
most, and a far rarer one, being a naturalized immigrant from
Europe found only in the salt marshes from the Massachusetts
coast to New York.
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