This Mother’s Day, I’ve been thinking about Hollyhocks.
Towering and unruly, they rise where other flowers hesitate to grow.
Along fences, beside forgotten roads, against weathered walls. Hollyhocks carry an old-world beauty, but also a kind of quiet endurance.
In the language of flowers, they symbolize fertility, abundance, ambition, and resilience.
And resilience feels important right now.
Every year I collect and save their seeds, scattering them further across my property.
This season I’ve planted them right to the edges of the road, inspired by my homeland of Australia, where hollyhocks sway beside telephone poles and old fences in urban towns, bright sentinels standing tall in unexpected places.
There’s something deeply maternal about them to me.
Not delicate, not ornamental, but generous. They seed themselves freely, multiplying and returning year after year.
In Victorian flower language, hollyhocks represented fertility and abundance because of this prolific nature, their ability to scatter life so effortlessly into the world.
But they also symbolized ambition.
Their vertical reach, often growing over eight feet tall, was seen as a reflection of striving upward, of hope, determination, and the courage to keep growing toward the light.
I love that combination, softness and ambition existing together.
Historically, hollyhocks have long carried folklore and symbolism across cultures.
In Japan, known as aoi, they became an important emblem associated with protection and nobility.
In rural cottage gardens, they were once affectionately called “outhouse flowers,” planted around privies to soften and conceal them. Entire generations would know where the loo was simply by spotting a stand of hollyhocks blooming nearby.
Some stories claimed hollyhocks could reveal the fairy realm, tall floral doorways standing between the ordinary and the enchanted fairy world.
The more I researched them, the more I fell in love with their contradictions. They are sturdy yet romantic, practical yet whimsical, wild yet deeply rooted.
While reading about hollyhocks, I came across this poem by Shaded Lamp.
The moment I read “hollyhocks, sandals with socks and salty air,” I was completely transported. Shaded Lamp I hope you don’t mind that I share it, please reach out if you happen to read this!
80’s Holiday - By Shaded Lamp
Hollyhocks, sandals with socks
Knickerbocker glories
Salty air, old caravans
Magical bedtime stories
Fish ‘n’ chips, sticks of rock
Climbing fragrant evergreens
Endless hikes, stunning views
There’s something about hollyhocks that holds memory so well.
Perhaps that’s why they continue to return, not just in gardens, but in stories, in childhoods, in old photographs, in the spaces where women before us once planted them.
A flower of abundance.
A flower of resilience.
A flower that keeps coming back.
As a mother myself, I just wanted to wish a Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers, nurturers, and caretakers, on Mother’s Day and every day.
x Rebecca
