Tag Archives: Flowers

Are Hollyhocks Colonial or Colonial Revival?

And now for a really important question, but about all I can take on during these dog days of summer: are hollyhocks Colonial or Colonial Revival? The hollyhocks were simply beautiful and characteristically statuesque at the Saint Gaudens National Historic Site when we stopped by on the way back from Vermont a few weeks ago and I started thinking about them. Hollyhocks don’t look like a particularly useful plant but they are on the cover of so many books on “Colonial” gardens published at the beginning of the twentieth centuy: they seem to be the very symbol of the Colonial Revival garden (along with the sundial and the arbor). So what’s the story, Colonial or Colonial Revival?

Hollyhocks in Cornish, NH and on the cover of early 20th centuy gardening books: Shelton (1906); Ely (1903); Bennett (1919); McCauley (1911); “Colonial” woman and hollyhocks in font of the John Ward House, Salem in a c. 1911 photo by Mary Harrod Northend; layout for a Colonial Garden from Colonial gardens; the landscape architecture of George Washington’s time (1932).

So as you can see, hollyhocks were a mainstay in the “old-fashioned” gardens of the Colonial Revival era, but were they actually revived? Were they also present in gardens from centuries prior? I think that the answer is a qualified yes: hollyhocks were both Colonial and Colonial Revival, but the hollyhocks of the earlier era were a bit different than that of the latter. When horticultural authors in the early modern England referenced hollyhocks (which they spelled in many different ways, believe me), they meant Althea officinalis or what we call Marsh Mallow today. Marsh Mallow is a great old plant that I used to have in my garden but it disappeared last year. All mallows were utilized for their soothing effects, and John Winthrop included them in his order for “garden seeds” dispatched to London in 1631. The hollyhock in particular seems to have been an Asian variety brought west in the wake of the Crusades, and while it is often said that the naturalist William Turner fashioned the name hollyhock (or holyoke) in his 1551 Newe Herball, it dates from the fourteenth century at the very least. Turner’s Herball contained woodcut illustrations copied directly from the lovely colored engravings of Leonhard Fuch’s De Historia Stirpium (1543), and he also followed Fuchs in giving hollyhocks the scientific name Malva hortensis. The Fuchs illustration is below: as you can see, it is definitely a familiar hollyhock, but noticeably smaller than our modern variety. And that’s what happened to the Hollyhock: it was improved through hybridization in the nineteenth century. Malva hortensis became Althea Rosea and ultimately Alcea Rosea. The Boston nurseryman John Breck, author of the influential The Flower Garden or Breck’s Flowers (1851), disdained the popular dahlia and promoted the humble hollyhock, as a great improvement has been made in this old-fashioned, ordinary flower, within a few years, that has brought it before the public under a new phase; and it now bids fair to become as popular as many other flowers have been when taken in hand by the florist. Breck was referring to the cross-breeding success of his colleague across the Atlantic, Saffron Walden nurseryman William Chater, who had produced double hollyhocks with large flowers, “of better form, more substance in the petal, and more decided in colour.” And thus the hollyhook took off, its success limited only by the onset of a rusty disease that is still with us, unfortunately.

Sixteenth- and nineteenth-century hollyhocks: Wellcome Images; George Baxter’s print of Valentine Bartholomew’s Hollyhocks (1857), Victoria & Albert Museum.

Another major factor in the increasing popularity of the hollyhock must have been the many artistic depictions appearing on both side of the Atlantic from the 1870s: painters of all artistic schools, from impressionism to realism, painted stunning and soaring hollyhocks, often in the company of women. I could include hundreds of such paintings in this post, but I’ve limited myself to just a few of my favorite works. I’ve started out with Ross Sterling Turner’s Hollyhocks from 1876 because he is a Salem artist, but it’s not as representative as a painting fom the very same year by another New England artist, Eastman Johnson. Girls and hollyhocks just go together! It’s no wonder that the garden writers of the next decades, among them so many women, favored them. Hollyhocks were also a framing device, as Childe Hassam demonstrated in his many depictions of his friend Celia Thaxter’s garden on the Isle of Shoals in the 1890s (reproduced in An Island Garden in 1894): they could define an entrance, a view, or even the gardener herself. My favorite depiction of hollyhocks is in Abbot Fuller Graves’ painting Portsmouth Doorway (1910) at the Peabody Essex Museum, but everybody else’s impressionist over-the-top hollyhocks with a woman-in-white work seems to be Frederick Carl Friesek’s Hollyhocks from the following year.

Ross Sterling Turner, Hollyhocks (1876), LA County Museum of Art; Eastman Johnson, Hollyhocks (1876), New Britain Museum of American Art; Childe Hassam, In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in her Garden) (1892); Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Abbot Fuller Graves, Portsmouth Doorway (1910), Peabody Essex Museum; Frederick Carl Frieseke, Hollyhocks (1911), National Academy of Design.


Lupines & Lindsay Road

What a bright and glorious June: quite the contrast to the dark and challenging time we find ourselves in. I’m in York Harbor for most of it, gardening, reading, taking long walks: it feels far from the maddening crowd. I feel very fortunate: my only concerns are whether or not the gardens are getting enough water, both in Salem and York, and what’s happening in our evolving kitchen renovation in the former—thankfully my working husband is managing that, and he’s probably seeing to the garden as well. That’s just a small pocket garden so not too much time or effort: here we have gardens spread out over a much larger area so it’s a bigger task, but still a pleasurable one. This is context for my post today, which is not going to be the product of rather of deep thought or research, but rather simply existing in a beautiful place: flowers and houses shot while gardening (indirectly) and walking. My father and I were driving to the dump with all of our lawn and garden refuse last when we came upon a field of lupines, the perfect (with roses) June flower. What a gift: so I thought I would share it here. This is the way lupines are supposed to look, not one or two or three or even fifteen in a cultivated garden, but a field:

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20200610_122508Lupines in a field on Route 91 in York, Maine.

More eye candy: some of my favorite houses on my favorite street in York, Lindsay Road. This is a way that runs from the center of York Village to the river, and though it’s not going to be apparent from my pictures, there is in fact some architectural diversity on this old street: there are “colonials”, old and new, a perfect Federal, a Greek Revival or two, some modern “country club” houses (as the golf club of the York Golf and Tennis club is adjacent, and even a bungalow. It’s a great street, ending up (if you’re coming from the Village), at John Hancock’s Wharf and Marshall’s Store.

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20200613_125723Lindsay Road, York, Maine.


Early June Garden

I feel a bit selfish and indulgent featuring my garden during this troubling and tumultuous week, but I really don’t have anything else to offer. My dear readers and followers seemed to like last week’s garden post, and though I am no Marianne Majerus or Stacy Bass, it’s almost impossible to take a bad photograph of some flowers, like my beloved Trillium and Lady’s Slippers, both “out” this week! Our big kitchen demolition/renovation is starting very soon and there will likely put a lot of sawdust in this adjacent garden, so it’s the last we’ll see of it for some time. I’ll miss my garden this summer, but I’m off to our family house in Maine, where my father want to put in a new garden, so that project will be somewhat compensatory: soliciting all tips from Maine gardeners—-for a site with full sun but lots of ledge (we already have a rock garden).

Meanwhile, here’s my little city plot this past week:

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20200531_192145It’s a bit wild but that’s how I like it—contained chaos. But I will say that the anemones are MONSTERS this year. 

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20200531_162958I’m sorry that the Lady’s Mantle hasn’t popped yet but I do have Lady’s Slippers to show you!

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pixlr_20200601145348621And flourishing ferns, trillium, and one of my very favorite plants, lungwort, which looks like this all summer long, not just at showstopper time.


Rose Reverie

These are the rose weeks of the summer in central New England: while newer varieties of roses are bred to be repeat- or ever-blooming the older varieties bloom now, so if you walk the streets of an older city or town you’re going to see bursting bushes behind and over fences and along porches and foundations. Often red or a very very dark pink. I’m not certain what cultivar these roses are: at first glance they appear to be of the gallica variety, the oldest type of rose to be cultivated in Europe which was brought to North America in the seventeenth century. Certainly several of the rose bushes in the “Colonial” garden behind the Derby House are gallica, cultivated for their medicinal and household uses as much as for their beauty. When I’m walking down the street taking photographs of rose bushes at this time of year and happen to spot a homeowner in close proximity, I always ask about their roses, and I nearly always get the answer: oh they’ve been there forever.

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Salem was a horticultural haven in the nineteenth century, so it’s fairly easy to find out what people were growing and showing. When I look through periodicals like the New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register or the Transactions of the Essex Horticultural Society it is pretty clear that most people were more excited about dahlias than roses at mid-century, though Francis Putnam did have quite a collection of showy roses on hand, including La Reine, Duchess of Sutherland, Aubernon, Baron Prevost, Madame Laffey, Madame Damame, Mrs. Eliot, Devoniensis, Bon Silene, Bossuet, and Anne Boleyn, though he was a florist by trade. I have a pink David Austin Anne Boleyn rosebush in my garden, though I doubt it’s the same cultivar as Mr. Putnam’s nineteenth-century varietal. According to Alice Morse Earle’s Old Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth (1901), an even more storied English rose, the “York and Lancaster” striped gallica, could once be found on the grounds of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthplace in its original location on Union Street. Interest in the “old-time” roses was clearly reviving in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as was the lore attached to all sorts of flowers according to the “language” attributed to them, but serious garden writers always cautioned against mixing up the York and Lancaster with its similarly-striped cousin, the “Rosa Mundi” rose, which had even earlier “historical” origins.

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Roses Collage

Rosa Mundi Cutis Botanical MagazineJohn Ramsbottom’s “King Penguin” book, 1939, with its York and Lancaster illustration; Mrs. L. Burke’s The Language of Flowers, 1865; Rosa Mundi from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1790s.

Enough of history and let’s see some more roses about town, including my own (first up) which are modern David Austin varieties: my house was a working (rooming) house for much of its life and I doubt there was space (or time) for a flower garden, so I don’t have any old rosebushes. I don’t like any red in the garden for some reason (though I love it indoors), so it’s pink and yellow and ivory for me. Then we have: one of my favorite pocket gardens on Botts Court, two very dependable displays nearby, and the particularly lush roses behind (not in) the Ropes Mansion Garden—just love these. It’s summer now.

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Historic Shops of Lisbon

My first and last purchases in Lisbon were books titled Historic Shops of Lisbon and Historical Shops in Lisbon and in between I tried to visit as many of the shops featured in these two books as possible: and then some. It was very clear to me that both the books and the shops referenced in their pages are part of movement focused on the preservation and promotion of Lisbon’s unique commercial culture. It wasn’t very difficult to surmise this as it was very clearly stated in Historical Shops, which was published under the auspices of the rculo das Lojas de Carácter e Tradição de Lisboa [Circle of Characterful and Traditional Shops of Lisbon], which is dedicated to supporting and encouraging “its member shops to ensure their own preservation and their present and future viability, by promoting their excellence and sustainability…..with the ultimate aim of preserving the rich cultural heritage and identity of the city of Lisbon.” Likewise, Historic Shops features a foreword by Lisbon Mayor Fernando Medina explaining the origins and rationale for the Historic Shops Programme initiative, launched in 2015 to preserve and promote local commerce for both its economic and cultural benefits.

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Historical Shops features sketches by artists associated with Urban Sketchers, who have their own mission! Top illustration by Inês Ferreira, bottom by José Leal.

And so I went to a hat shop, a glove shop, a candle shop established in 1789, shops selling sewing notions and yarn, linen shops, jewelry stores, several wonderful flower shops including one selling seeds in both packets and striped open bags, book stores and pharmacies (Lisbon’s pharmacies seem like a culture unto themselves, and there is also a pharmaceutical museum), and shops selling coffee, tea, and all manner of tinned fish. Lots of pottery and fabric fish were in evidence too. These shops had different levels of “accessibility”: several did not allow photographs of their wares, a very unusual policy in this Instagram age.

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The pride of Portuguese craftsmanship extends to newer establishments as well, particularly A Vida Portuguesa and the beautiful collections of shops (+restaurant) in the Embaixada, an over-the-top 19th-century palace transformed into a shopping gallery. I think my perfect Lisbon shopping day would start in its neighborhood, the Principe Reale, where I would also visit Solar, an amazing museum-shop of antique Portuguese azulejos and pottery (no photographs there). Then I would descend down into the Chiado, where so many of the historic shops are located, then down to the water. That’s pretty much what I did on my last day in Lisbon, ending up, appropriately, at the Praça do Comércio (hitting the lovely Benamôr shop, which has been manufacturing beauty creams since 1925 almost along the way). By the end of the trip, I only had room for a few slim notebooks and tubes in my suitcase, but I’ll be better prepared in terms of both shopping and space the next time I’m in Lisbon.

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Shopping

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Solar, The Embaixada, A Vida Portuguesa, and Benamôr (+ a few shops whose names I don’t remember—shopping daze).


What’s up in Salem

I had a dream the night before last about William Huntingdon Sanders, shivering with his Malaria-induced fever on a hospital piazza in Cuba, unattended and very much alone. When I woke up, I walked up to Harmony Grove Cemetery to see his grave, and on the way home, looked for signs of spring in Salem. We’re not quite there yet: you can tell that next week will see the big burst that always seems so sudden to me. But there was some color, highlighted by the emergence of the sun in the course of the day. Nothing much in my yard–which is very much dominated by later-blooming herbs and perennials–except for these amazing variegated plants whose name I have forgotten (last photograph below): I saw them in a small courtyard garden at Hampton Court Palace last year and had to have them, and a colleague’s husband graciously supplied me with three. I lost one, but look at the two remaining:  they’ve been blooming for a month and now I’m wondering how big they are going to get. I want more!

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Name this plant, please!


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