Hollyhock Ladies

As I was writing about the rose of Sharon yesterday, it brought back memories of my childhood.  When I was young, we had a rose of Sharon tree that grew outside our living room window. It had been grafted, so that different branches had three different colors of flowers, red, white and lavender-blue. As is typical of rose of Sharon, when it bloomed, it had loads of flowers.


One of the things I remember was making little "ladies" from the flowers of the rose of Sharon, or from hollyhocks.  Both have trumpet-shaped flowers.  We would pick a fully-open flower for the body, and a bud for the head, and use a toothpick to hold them together. We called these "hollyhock ladies." I hadn't thought about this for years, but discussing the rose of Sharon for my blog post yesterday brought it all back to me.