Edited by Richard Walker, Thursday, 11 Jul 2019, 22:41
This familiar flower of waysides and disturbed ground is Common Mallow. The Mallow family includes many familiar garden plants, such as Hollyhocks, Lavatera, and Hibiscus.
The flower is always the key to recognising what family a flowering plant belongs to, and if you know these plants you may be able to see the resemblance to Mallow.
Also in the family is Marshmallow, a plant whose roots were historically made into a confection. Modern marshmallows are only connected by the name.
Surprisingly this plant family also features cotton and cacao = chocolate, and is thus of huge ecomonic importance.
'Mallow' is from Latin Malva and I think the plant has a similar name in most European languages. Modern Greek seems to be Μολόχα, Molócha, and some scholars have suggested the altered form could have been influenced by the Ancient Greek for 'soft'. Did this link to the marshmallow, a soft root, or even to cotton, already known in ancient times, as I understand it?
On The Verge
This familiar flower of waysides and disturbed ground is Common Mallow. The Mallow family includes many familiar garden plants, such as Hollyhocks, Lavatera, and Hibiscus.
The flower is always the key to recognising what family a flowering plant belongs to, and if you know these plants you may be able to see the resemblance to Mallow.
Also in the family is Marshmallow, a plant whose roots were historically made into a confection. Modern marshmallows are only connected by the name.
Surprisingly this plant family also features cotton and cacao = chocolate, and is thus of huge ecomonic importance.
'Mallow' is from Latin Malva and I think the plant has a similar name in most European languages. Modern Greek seems to be Μολόχα, Molócha, and some scholars have suggested the altered form could have been influenced by the Ancient Greek for 'soft'. Did this link to the marshmallow, a soft root, or even to cotton, already known in ancient times, as I understand it?