Over five years ago, I was enthralled with a floppy local flower. We decided to see if we could cultivate some closer to where we live. I present my mallows!

My Mallows – Swamp Rose Mallows

In October of 2019 I posted about how we had harvested some seed pods from a local flower. The Swamp Rose Mallow was growing in two different spots along our bicycle routes. But it was only growing on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River. Our hope was that we could grow some new plants from seed on the Pennyslvania side.

It took five years, but it turned out to be a huge success.

After the plants had gone to seed in 2019, we harvested the seed pods. We had marked plants with colored yarn to indicate the flower color and took seeds from each of three plants with different colored flowers. Then we stored the seeds in the freezer and planned to plant them the following year on the Pennsylvania side of the river. We forgot about them and ended up planting them in 2021.

In Spring of 2022 and 2023, we saw no indication that anything had grown. We figured our plan had failed. But in 2024 we saw what we thought were rose mallow plants. So there was some hope. Then this year, the bloomed!

Strangely enough, they have bloomed in three different places. And we only planted them in one of those places. So clearly either the flow of the canal or wildlife has spread the seeds of this hearty flowering plant.

While I write “my” when I describe these flowering plants, it was really all Thaddeus’ idea and mostly his efforts. I really only helped.

Current Knitting

I’ve been focusing almost solely on the Aurora Cabin Shawl and the pace has slowed to a crawl!

It’s still a complete joy to knit…it’s a great project. But I’m up to about 400 stitches per row now, so it’s moving along more slowly.