Friday Fabulous Flower - Big

 If your perennial garden doesn't have one of these, it should.  The flowers aren't just big, they are huge.  And it is almost a carefree plant.  It only suffers from being tasty to Japanese beetles.  This cultivar is related to one of the rose mallows, a species of Hibiscus, but TPP doesn't know which one, perhaps H. moscheutos.  This is the one of the biggest flowers in our garden in terms of diameter, only surpassed by one of the big-leafed magnolias (back a few FFF's ago).  So that flower is about 8 " in diameter, pretty gaudy.  The cultivars come in a range of colors from white to dark red.  All have a center target of darker red.  It also flowers in mid to late summer.  

This plant was also called a marsh mallow because the grew in wet areas.  The roots were spongy and white, and if sweetened they were used as a confection, the botanical ancestor of marshmellows, a purely sugar confection.

Friday Fabulous Flower - wallow in mallows

This is nothing new, rose mallows, but they  are one of the biggest flowers you can get in your summer garden.  For a dramatic impact, plant a whole patch of them (following a Phactor gardening rule: no onesies).  A big patch of big flowers (about 8" diam) can catch almost anybody's attention.  Some gardens label these as "hardy hibiscus", and while they are herbaceous perennials and reasonably hardy, and they are members of the mallow family, and even a species of Hibiscus(H. moscheutos), calling them the rose or rose swamp mallow in preferable, as most things called hibiscus are woody. Only problem, Japanese beetles love them.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Flower of an hour

Well, Friday got away without a flower.  Here's one that TPP likes even if it is a weed because it does have a pretty flower, and large for the size of the plant too.  This isn't a common weed in our urban gardens, and it actually isn't difficult to control, but the city took out a soon to be dead white ash and brought in some city soil with what are more common agricultural weeds in the area, and it contained seeds of two members of the same family.  Here abouts this is called "flower of an hour" (Hibiscus trionum) because the flower doesn't last long.  The five red stigma lobes mark this as a hibiscus.  The rest of the flower is a classic mallow (family) famous for the spongy white roots of the marsh mallow.  The other weed is velvet leaf - Abutilon theophrastii that was probably imported to N. America for use as a fiber plant, a failure obviously.  Flower of an hour was also imported, perhaps with other agricultural seeds, perhaps as an ornamental.  The inflated and persistent calyx can be seen just above flower, and out of focus.  The bull's eye floral image is even stronger under UV light. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Rose mallow

During the past two weeks, visits to beaches have been pretty frequent, but that only included three with natural vegetation pretty much intact. In this part of the NE USA, this very gaudy plant, the rose mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos) occupies a zone where the beach vegetation meets more inland vegetation, particularly where it is a bit wet. The rose mallow has typical enough mallow/hibiscus flowers, but they are 6 or more inches in diameter. These herbaceous perennials grow to 5-6 feet under good conditions and several cultivars exist for some mid-summer color, but note that Japanese beetles love members of the mallow family.