One hot summer evening in 2020, my husband and I walked around our new neighbourhood. We had spent the day moving our belongings into our first home and, as I got to know the streets that I would eventually cycle down and push a buggy around, I pocketed the little husks of seed heads from hollyhocks that bowed over the pavements.
This time of year – proper, full-blooded summer – always makes me think of hollyhocks. There’s something puppyish in their appeal: undeniably pleasant, reaching several feet into blue skies, a spear of floral trumpets in sweet-shop hues. Around these parts (the Brixton/Camberwell borders in south London) they decorate as many tree wells and forgotten scraps of land as they do front gardens. Each summer I photograph the most unlikely ones: last year a clutch sprung up around an industrial-scale wheelie bin.
Technically speaking, if you want to sow hollyhocks from scratch, the best time to do it is April or May under cover (such as in a glasshouse or on a windowsill), or May or June directly into the ground outside. While they can live for a few years, hollyhocks are often treated as biennials: they will flower the year after they are sown, which they will spend bulking up, throwing out lily pad or fig leaf-shaped foliage as a whisper of anticipation of the fanfare to come. For speedier results, you’ll want to plant something that was sown last year – available from nurseries or garden centres now. In the right spot (warm, sunny, sheltered), hollyhocks can bloom long into the autumn.
I’ve never actually bought a traditional hollyhock (Alcea rosea), for what it’s worth, although I have a real habit for their fancier cousins, Alcalthaea suffrutescens ‘Parkallee’. Nevertheless, I have two of them growing in the garden at present. These are the descendants of those first snaffled seeds, scattered with abandon, only to pop up several summers later. Hollyhocks feel like the kind of plants that are best passed on – one seedling I raised on a balcony came from seeds harvested by a friend in Provence; I then took it to my sister’s garden, where its offspring continue to thrive.
If you simply want to admire these sun-worshippers, Charleston House in Firle, East Sussex, is one of the more romantic spots to do so. Artist Vanessa Bell added them into Roger Fry’s plans for the walled garden of her country home with Bloomsbury set member Duncan Grant. Decades on and the hollyhocks are a key part of the Festival of the Garden that takes place there every July, peeking over the tops of the flint-studded walls and seemingly propping up the 17th-century door frames, welcoming visitors in.