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The Case of the Elusive Black Hollyhock
You can’t always get what you want…
Some people want expensive clothes and finery.
Some people want a yacht.
Some people just want food on the table.
I want a black hollyhock.
Gardening can take up as much space as you allot to it. I don’t have nearly enough space to do what I want, so most of my gardening takes place in containers. My gardening career began with vegetables, but then the joy I found in flowers unearthed a whole new pleasure.
I attribute part of my love for flowers to Georgia O’Keeffe. She liked painting abstracts of flowers. She had a way of showing parts of a flower that a normal person would walk right by and not notice. She painted them big.
“I’ll paint it big — I’ll paint what I see — I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.” -Georgia O’Keeffe
Now about those hollyhocks…
Living for a few years in Santa Fe also curated my taste for flowers, and I began to see what O’Keeffe saw in them. But specifically, it was the presence of hollyhocks. Around every corner you turned, there they were. They can scratch an existence out of a crack in a sidewalk and thrive. Even more so, it was the black hollyhocks that captured my…
