Musk Mallow - a wild flower for the garden




Musk mallow (Malva moschata) has lovely finely divided leaves growing in an expanding dome in spring.  The pink flowers open in early summer and this year have put on a great show.  Flowers and foliage have a faint musky smell.  It is a short-lived perennial but it self seeds freely. I've just cut off the seed heads to limit the number of plants appearing next year! In the wild it grows on verges and in grassland - something for a wildflower meadow?  Bees like it!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Daphnes

Image
 It's a pity that scent can't be captured online because it's a stunning feature of most Daphnes.  The first one I encountered was at what is now the Sir Harold Hillier Garden near Romsey on an EHS trip!  Our guide told  that the scent of Daphne bholua  'Jacqueline Postill' would blow our socks off and so it did.  Here's my mine,  in full flower after first coming into flower in December. A lower growing, bushy variety in my front garden, is Daphne odora aureomarginata.    It has spread a lot, and though the books say they shouldn't be pruned, it'll have to be as it's overgrowing other plants.  When it was new and small it was tramped on by builders who stuck together with blue plastic tape, so hopefully it'll survive another chop. Not all Daphnes have a strong scent.  Daphne laureola forms a low growing rounded bush with green lightly scented flowers.  It is a woodland plant, growing wild in Southern England and flowering thr...
Read more

Splitting Calathea 'triostar' - an Easter Monday project.

Image
 I bought the original plant from an EHS plant sale - I can't remember how long ago - and it cost me £4.  What great value it's been.  I think it only had 4 leaves, and now, at least four years later, there are four 'shoots' in the pot each with five or six leaves.   Calathea triostar before it was split. It was in its original 1.5 litre pot, so I decided to use the same size pot for the separated plants.  I chose Melcourt Sylvagrow peat-free multi-purpose compost to plant them in, my current favourite.  The plant came cleanly out of its pot.  Each shoot comes from a rhizome, so to separate the shoots the rhizome has to be broken.  I did this by gently breaking them apart (you could cut them). The four transplanted shoots were watered and are now recovering in the (empty) bath, where it is well lit but not directly.  It's an ideal place for them but not very practical in the long run.  Calathea does best in warm humid conditions....
Read more

Autumn Cyclamen

Image
  When the lovely pink flowers of Cyclamen hederafolium appear it's near the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.  As the flowers fade the leaves appear.  They are ivy-shaped, from which the Latin word 'hederafolium' comes:  Hedera = ivy and folium = leaf.  They have beautiful silvery markings on them which vary from plant to plant.  They provide interesting ground cover throughout autumn and winter.  In spring the leaves die back and the corm beneath the soil lies dormant until the following autumn.   I was given a few corms by my father who was fond of cyclamen.  Now they are all over my garden.  The seeds, found in round cases at the end of a coiled stem, are spread by ants who are attracted by their sweet sticky covering and carry them away.   Watch out for Cyclamen coum , the late winter/early spring flowering variety!
Read more