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 - Mallow

One of the larger and gaudier flowers that you can easily raise is the rose mallow (Hibiscus mosacheutos).  Like all related flowers the large number of stamens forms a tube through which the style grows bearing a branched 5-parted stigma.  The flowers are huge, 8-9" across, and they are white, pink, rose, or red with red highlights (nectar guides) in their centers. Often this time of year when the rose mallows flower, the Japanese beetles appear and chew the crap out of the mallows and quite a few other plants too, although they do love the mallows.  This year for some reason the beetle population is quite small, do little to no damage.  These are herbaceous perennials, so they die back to the ground and grow new aerial shoots each year.  

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 - Rose Mallow

It's hard to argue with this herbaceous perennial in terms of flower size, fully open flowers of the rose mallow may be 7-8 inches in diameter. The flowers appear in mid-summer and are borne at the top of 3-4 foot tall stems. Colors range from white, through pinks to red.  Of course they exhibit the hallmarks of the mallow family.  The only problem is that mallows are a favorite food of Japanese beetles, so in years of a bad infestation, these big, beautiful flowers get chewed up pretty badly.  You can't get much of an easier plant to grow. So you just have to ask, "Why don't I have one of these?"  TPP assumes that the rose mallow is a cultivar of Hibiscus moshceutos, and not far off from the marsh mallow, better known for the confection named after it than as the plant itself. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - rose mallow

TPP may have done the rose mallow before, but these flower merit a repeat. Quite honestly TPP doesn't know what species of mallow this cultivar comes from because there are several large flowered wild mallows and rose mallow (either one word or two) is a common name applied to at least 3 species in two genera, so there you go. These are one of the largest, showiest flowers you can easily grow; these are just over 20 cm in diameter. And of course they flower in the mid-summer garden. This image was captured early in the morning just after the buds opened; a few hours later the Japanese beetles had riddled the petals with holes. They love members of the rose family and mallow family. Groan.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Rose mallow

All the locals say today is Saturday, but it still doesn’t seem right to the Phactor, and it's still Friday back home. Not only that but posting a flower from the gardens at home, albeit a very showy flower, one that opened on the very morning of our departure, just doesn’t seem right. But for now it will have to do. The weather in Sydney is not conducive for botanizing or any form of out of door activities (wettest July in over 60 years). So you make do with what you have, and what we have is a rose mallow, which has the largest diameter flower in our garden (~9 inches). Even better the Japanese beetles who dearly love mallows are not nearly the menace this year as last. Now what is significant is that this is the very first picture taken with a brand spanking new Nikon Coolpix P7000 camera, which is a compact camera for serious photographers. For a couple of decades the Phactor lugged around a gadget bag with two camera backs and several lens, and for all that effort a very good picture every now and again. And people had their instamatic cameras, handy, convenient, but you couldn’t bring yourself to stoop that low, but digital cameras changed the game. This is a very serious camera not to be recommended to anyone who isn’t a serious photographer because in a standard automatic mode many other simpler, easier cameras can do as well, but what this camera can do in addition is awesome. At present the Phactor is only half way through the instruction manual and that’s after a trans-Pacific flight with lots of time to spend, and sometime during the instructions for using the white balance feature, the brain shut down. And none of this has much to do with a rose mallow. This is not actually a FFF repeat, although it's wild relative was used for a post last summer. This is a cultivar that comes in a variety of colors with a bit larger flower than the wild species.

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.