214 
Hollyhock. 
cannot be discussed here : what is not apart from our plan, 
however, is reference to their showy splendour—a splendour 
that is doubly prized because it does not “ put forth such blaze 
of beauty as translates to dullest hearts its dialect of pride,” 
until full-hearted summer has carried off all her other floral 
favourites. Then does the stately stem of the hollyhock shoot 
up above the fading and faded blossoms, and bedecks itself 
with gallant bouquets of roses—roses of every tint and every 
hue, from the palest blush to the deepest crimson, from flaky 
white to the deepest orange; and, sometimes bursting forth 
purplish black, or glossy brown, looks, as Jean Ingelow poeti¬ 
cally asserts, 
“ Queen hollyhock, with butterflies for crowns. ” 
The author of the “ Poetry of Gardening ” thinks that for 
ornamenting lawns there is nothing to surpass the old-fashioned 
hollyhock. “ This,” he remarks, “ is the only landscape flower 
Ave possess—the only one, that is, whose forms and colours tell 
in the distance ; and so picturesque is it, that perhaps no artist 
ever attempted to draw a garden without introducing it, whether 
it was really there or not. By far the finest effect,” adds this 
writer, “that combined art and nature ever produced in garden¬ 
ing, were those fine masses of many-coloured hollyhocks clus¬ 
tered round a weather-tinted vase, such as Sir Joshua delighted 
to place in the wings of his pictures. And what more magnifi¬ 
cent than a long avenue of these floral giants, backed by a dark 
thick hedge of old-fashioned yew ? Such an avenue,” remarks 
the same author, “ was once to be seen in the fulness of its 
autumn splendour in a garden of a deep lawyer, at Granton, 
near Edinburgh. It was,” he concludes, “the most gorgeous 
mass of colouring we ever beheld ! ” 
This essayist, who manifests a great partiality for the pomp¬ 
ous flower, elsewhere depicts “a vase of large dimensions and 
bolder sculpture, backed by the heads of a mass of crimson, 
rose, and straw-coloured hollyhocks that spring up from the 
bank below,” as a triumph of poetical gardening. 
