The Marvelous Mallow
Good for bees, good for the spirit!
The stormy days seem to have passed on for now. The tomatoes have had a wet summer so far and the okra’s not as high as last year’s, but we cut the first pods today. And tomorrow we’ll make garden-fresh scalloped potatoes.
Moonflowers are blooming now in the evenings. They’re subtropical (all this rain!), but we also have their more northern relatives, the smaller purple, pink and white morning glories whose vines happily wrap the Rabbit Gatepost. I’ll never tire of glimpsing these two flowers as their buds unfurl, very nearly in front of your eyes.
Then one August day you’re out on the screened porch, and there’s the first red mallow!
The mallow unfurls but it’s a bit too fancy to be in the elegant moonflower’s family.
In our 1928 edition of How to Know the Wildflowers: a Guide to the Names, Haunts, and Habits of Our Common Wild Flowers, I see that our mallow is in the hibiscus family.
Author Frances Theodora Parsons describes the circumstances of the smaller, pink rose mallow. Our mallow is more dramatic, but I feel just as she does about the time of year. She says,
When the beautiful rose mallow slowly unfolds her pink banner-like petals and admits the eager bee to her stores of golden pollen, then we feel the summer is far advanced. …
Here is none of the timorousness of the early [garden] blossoms which peep shyly out, as if ready to beat a hasty retreat should a late frost overtake them. but rather a calm assurance that the time is ripe, and that the salt marshes and brackish ponds are only awaiting their rosy lining.
Our larger mallow, too, can peep shyly out!
The marsh mallow appears in Brother Cadfael’s Herb Garden. This flower is featured in one of Brother Cadfael’s Chronicles, specifically in XVI The Heretic’s Apprentice.
In the Cadfael book authors Rob Talbot and Robin Whiteman write about the medicinal effects of the marsh mallow:
The leaves and roots of marsh mallow were freshly prepared to soothe the surface soreness of a wound. …
Pliny said that one of the marvels of all mallows was that ‘whoever swallows half a cyathus [wine-ladle] of the juice a day shall be immune to all diseases.’
I was also curious to see what the mallow represents in the language of flowers. I found online that the
mallow carries many symbolic meanings … including romantic interest, healing, and survival in tough conditions. It can also mean giving in to your emotions or passions and being swept away by love, which makes it both a positive and negative symbol.
I disagree that this flower is “both a positive and negative symbol”. I see nothing at all to prevent the conditions of romance, healing, survival and passion all existing in the same person, perhaps even at the same time. That’s a very positive thing, this richness and variety.
But what stands out to me most in this language of the mallow flower, at this moment in our country’s history, is its properties of “healing, and survival in tough conditions.”
Yes, it’s about survival but it’s also about living every day in its season, in rain and sun. It’s about being of great interest to bees, and offering joyful, bright color to those of us who stop to look, even on our most frantic days.
Every flower, large or tiny, bright or gentle, is just the same. And they are everywhere all around us, in August.
Thank you! For bringing us beauty for eyes and soul!
Lovely, both the flower and your writing.