Do you remember?

Do you remember the humble hollyhock?  I love these flowers and this year I have this beautiful pink beauty.  But what I really, really remember is staying with my grandmother when I was a wee one.  Because she passed away before I was out of elementary school, it was a long time ago.  She had such a wonderful garden of these hollyhocks in every color imaginable. To amuse me and the neighbor girls, in the hot summer afternoons we would go out and sit in the shade of the trees among the hollyhocks and she would fix us soda crackers with butter.  While we had our afternoon snack, we made hollyhock dolls.  With a few toothpicks and buds and blossoms, we transferred the humble flowers into beautiful "ladies".  The buds were their faces and adorned with bonnets of half-opened blooms atop full skirts of brilliant colored blossoms, they danced on the garden floor among the ferns.

Since I will be moving soon, and since I have only this one hollyhock this year, I am seriously thinking of planting these in many colors in memory of my "granny".  I have grown these before in deer country so it may be possible.  As we pack and sort through years of accumulation, I continue to collect seeds and every home I leave has a beautiful flower garden to pass on to what I hope will be an avid gardener. 

Today is my brother's birthday! He was just a baby when our grandmother passed away so he has no memories of her. But he does have grandbabies of his own now,  and as I sit on the sidelines and observe (with the miracle of computers, facebook, etc.) and although he is in Alaska, I can see that he is creating memories for those little people.  Happy Birthday Jim!