Why Hollyhocks Are Old-Fashioned Flowers

"Old-fashioned beauty," "old-fashioned Southern favorite," "definitive old-fashioned garden plant" -- why, when someone says "hollyhocks," does "old-fashioned" precede it? These yesterday were on an island in a strip-mall parking lot: showy, heart-colored; perhaps the popular "creme de cassis" color. I want some! Blossoms the size of a face! I want to meet whoever planted them for our enjoyment. And I want to know why they're old-fashioned.

My brother-in-law just phoned and I told him "hollyhocks" and he said his grandmother mentioned hollyhocks in one of the poems she wrote.

They're originally from China, where they're called "shu kui." Google Translate says "shu" means "book" and "kui" means "God," "chief," or "serious"; Wikipedia says that in Chinese legend, Kui was the inventor of music and dancing. In 15th-century England the plant was named "holyoke." They are neither holy nor oak, but it is said, who knows if it's true, hollyhocks arrived in England from the Holy Land.

Ancient photos show the house I lived in from birth to age 7 (house built 1887; no longer standing; it's a parking lot!) had a tumbledown white-painted arched wooden trellis, with two seats.

Me and Aunt Anna in Sunday best. The car's four "ventiports" identify it as a Buick.

Photograph taken summer 1958 is of me and "aunt" Anna Savin (nee Weiss), a German who during the war dug ditches in Russia. The trellis held morning glories in season, and behind us, outside of the fence, on long bare stems, are hollyhocks. Alongside the house in spring grew violets and lilies of the valley, and in summer,  "four o'clocks," cradling smart black seeds; we also had peony bushes. A lilac bush and orange lilies bloomed out back. My parents planted none of these. All these flowers are still designated "old-fashioned" perennials. There were rambling roses, because I remember the scent and thorns.

Those are all old-fashioned flowers because they're English cottage-garden flowers, and there must have been a time when English was the type of flower garden for a Midwestern householder to have. In the language of flowers, hollyhocks mean "ambition" or "fecundity."

I remember as a kid crumbling between my wondering fingers the corncob-like stamens of the hollyhocks. The flowers in the parking lot in 2020 I did not touch.

Fast Living

In Belfast, Ireland, for an international academic conference I gave a paper, but so did a lot of other people, and my paper was a success as were many others, and in this galaxy of new people and ideas I fell in love with the little pots of tea as well as 21-year-old Bushmill's whiskey, only 10 British pounds a glass, then upon returning home my head spun as I fought to finish two long long highly detailed articles and eight short ones, and draft new poems. It's spinning now.

I loved Northern Ireland and would settle there if only because the money has a picture of the Queen on it. The rest of Ireland uses euros. Dublin is a big city, a major city, the New York City of Ireland, with suburbs and all that. Belfast is a former shipbuilding town, walkable and quite trim, and one needn't go far to find castles and fishing villages. The Titanic was built in Belfast, and I thought the Titanic Museum would be corny. Oh no. This was serious economics, business, and labor, and the portion about the sinking was terrifying. Who was it who told me--I think it was the cathedral sexton--"Even little kids, three and four years old, come here and they have heard of the Titanic." It seems basal, like a collective memory; I felt changed, as if a shovelful of spirit, or complacency, or conviction about what life is, was moved from here to there. A museum hasn't done that to me since Auschwitz in 2012.

As usual I returned home and looked around in wonder: I live here? This is my house? My home? In all the world this is my home? My first venture out was to the grocery store where I saw this car in the parking lot and knew I was back home in Missouri.

Today I took a walk, a major achievement, and admired the December sky and its sun's long shadows, like no other month's, more like moonlight because the trees are leafless: museum of shadows.