Sidalcea 'Party Girl'

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Fewer hybrid tea roses, tall and red yuccas, lilies, daylilies under trees, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Russian sage, buddleia, rose of Sharon, purple phlox, lingering bouncing Bess, Sensation cosmos, zinnia, alfalfa, cucumbers; corn tasseling.

Outside the fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, winterfat, Queen Anne’s lace, fern-leaf and leather-leaf globemallows, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, datura, bush morning glory, stickleaf, Dutch, white prairie, and white sweet clovers, buffalo gourd, goat’s head, alfilerillo, silver-leaf nightshade, pigweed, Russian thistle, goat’s beard, hawkweed, paper flower, spiny lettuce, horseweed, strap-leaf and golden hairy asters, áñil del muerto, few native sunflowers, Tahokia daisies, goldenrod, sideoats grama.

In my yard looking north: Miniature roses, blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, last year’s snapdragon, Harweig evening primrose, squash, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Parker’s Gold yarrow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, orange coneflower, first chrysanthemum.

Looking east: Floribunda roses, hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, Jupiter’s beard, coral beardtongue, sea pink, large-leaf soapwort, Maltese cross, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Saint John’s wort, reseeded morning glory, garlic chives; buds on Autumn Joy sedum and cut-leaf coneflower.

Looking south: Blaze and rugosa roses, Illinois bundle flower, sweet peas; tomatillo has first pod.

Looking west: Caryopteris, catmint, lady bells, blue speedwell, spurge, blue flax, sea lavender, perennial four o’clock, purple coneflower; Mönch aster; buds on David phlox.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, snapdragon, nicotiana, sweet alyssum, tomato..

Inside: Aptenia, zonal geraniums, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds in pairs, geckos, bees, grasshoppers, black harvester and small red ants.

Weather: After more than a week of barren thunderstorms, we started getting rain Thursday; by Saturday the weeds had responded; 14:02 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Why ever would anyone cross a wildflower that only grows on the Pacific coast with one found in a small area of the Rocky mountains and expect to produce a hybrid that could compete in the mass market?

Jeff Cox was mincingly accurate when he said sidalcea hybrids were not for everyone. He wasn’t referring to a quirky taste for spiky plants with small, pinkish mallow flowers, but the fact that ornamental sidalceas only thrive in California, the coastal northwest and the warmer parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, New York, and New England. Anywhere else is problematical.

Alan Armitage was more forthright when he said the sidalcea hybrid he grew in his Athens, Georgia, garden behaved so poorly that "misery was its middle name." No matter how improved, they can’t handle the "heat and humidity of the midwestern and eastern states."

I haven’t yet found the person who admits to this experiment, but the seeds come from German companies. Jelitto introduced Bianca and Rosanna in 1989, then Purpetta in 1991. The seeds for the one I’m growing, Party Girl, are sold by Ernst Benary. Santa Fe Greenhouse offered it for the first time in 1994.

The attempt to domesticate wildflowers has gone through phases. William Robinson was reacting against formal plantings when he began promoting herbaceous perennial borders. Even so, in the 1889 edition of The English Flower Garden, he thought sidalceas "scarcely suitable for cultivation."

He noted Sidalcea malvaeflora, acerifolia, and oregana were being grown. These plants are the ones people would have discovered who went hunting for gold in California forty years before. Malvaeflora, one of the parents of Party Grow, is found in coastal prairies and scrub lands from Curry County, Oregon, to Baja.

When he revised his book in 1899 Robinson observed prairie mallows were "fast becoming better known" even though they couldn’t survive the cold winters of England. By then, species found when the Leadville silver mines opened Colorado in 1879 were becoming available. He thought the best were candida and malvaeflora, which were already available in variants, but he also mentioned oregana and spicata.

Candida, the other parent of Party Girl, was collected by Augustus Fendler growing along Santa Fé Creek in 1847, and has been found around Chama, and in the Las Vegas, Sandia, White and Sacramento mountains, where it grows on wet ground. The creeping rootstock appears in most counties of Utah, and scattered areas in the neighboring states of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming.

The sidalceas were marketed as miniature hollyhocks, a description that reveals the paradox of using wild plants in a formal garden. Even though Robinson advocated gardens that were more natural than carpet beds, herbaceous borders still feature unnaturally dense concentrations of perennials that produce more flowers than leaves.

Hollyhocks would never fit: their leaves are large and prone to insect damage; the stalks get rangy as they lengthen and the flowers more scattered. Sidalceas have basal rosettes of dark green, round leaves. The stems are narrow, and, in good conditions, divide into branches. The racemes resemble larkspur more than anything else.

Even in bad years, the dark leaves remain uneaten, and a few short stems appear with some flowers. However, they are members of the mallow family and will go to seed. I’m not the only one to discover the flower color is not exactly "bright rose-pink." In my climate the five petals are generally lavender, although they may appear pink in the morning or early in the summer.

The most recent interest in domesticating sidalceas occurred after the environmental activism of the 1970's when seedsmen like Karl Jelitto began introducing perennials that could be grown from seed, rather than more labor intensive cuttings.

The German cultivars coincided with an interest in natural plantings that featured ornamental grasses and plants that could survive minimally watered prairie plantings. Cox remarked that in such "a wild landscape lush with native flowers, pink flowered prairie mallow is one of the prettiest."

My first Party Girls always bloomed, continuously if not profusely, in a dry, wind location, but died out in five years. The replacements I bought in 2006 never got particularly tall in front of the retaining wall until last year, when one dropped its leathery seeds in the blue grama grass along the walk where its blooming now. The lobed leaves escaped their cultivated border and returned to familiar turf.

Notes:
Abrams, Le Roy and Roxana Stinchfield Ferris. An Illustrated Flora of the Pacific States, 1923.

Armitage, Allan M. Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 1989.

Cox, Jeff. Perennial All-Stars, 2002.

Fendler, Augustus. Plantae Fendlerianae, edited by Asa Gray, 1849.

Robinson, William. The English Flower Garden, 1889 and 1899 editions

Wooten, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Photograph: Sidalcea ‘Party Girl’ with blue grama grass and Maltese Cross leaves after the first rain in weeks, 24 July 2010.