A Member:  I would like to ask about the hollyhocks.  I saw such beautiful hollyhocks around Lake Minnetonka and I have never been able to make them winter.  I would like to ask about that.

Mr. Hawkins:  We have three plants, hollyhocks, digitalis and canterbury bells, and nearly all have the same trouble with them.  If we mulch them we are liable to have the center decay and the plants practically useless.  It is a question of mulching them too much or not mulching them.  I would like to have you speak up and tell us your experience.  I have in mind a gentleman who raises splendid hollyhocks in the neighborhood of the lakes.  Takes no care of them, and yet he had one this year seventeen feet high, which took care of itself and had any amount of blossoms.  I tried that experiment several years myself of mulching them, and the crown rotted.  These are three of the best flowers of the garden, and we ought to have some certain way of keeping them.

A Member:  Have you ever tried mulching them with corn stalks?

Mr. Hawkins:  Yes, I have tried it but lost them.

A Member:  I had very good luck with them that way.

A Member:  It is more a question of drainage than of mulching.

Mr. Hawkins:  That might be.

Mrs. Gould:  I wish simply to say that the trouble with winter grown hollyhocks and canterbury bells is that they will head so tall and must be kept dry.  I always cover the hollyhocks and if I had the others I think I would cover them.  I uncover mine early in the spring, and if it gets cold put on a little more straw.  You are almost sure to uncover them the wrong time.  With foxgloves I think it is almost unnecessary to cover them.

Mr. Hawkins:  In our gardens the hollyhocks form one of the best backgrounds we can have, beautiful, tall, stately stalks, and the canterbury bells, certainly nothing more beautiful than they.  Then we come to the other, the digitalis, which is equally as beautiful.  We must give our attention to the protection and growth of these in years to come because they are three of the beautiful things of the garden.  It has been suggested that digitalis be potted and put inside the cold frame and leaves put over them.  I think leaves are a splendid protection if you can keep them dry.  If I were using them as a mulch I would keep out the water by covering with roofing paper to keep them dry.

Mrs. Countryman:  I am told on good authority that the hollyhock is a true perennial and not a biennial.

Mrs. White:  It is listed in the foreign catalogs as both a perennial and a biennial.

Mrs. Countryman:  Wouldn’t the hollyhock come under the heading of being perennial but not a permanent perennial?

Mr. Hawkins:  It might be classed that way.  There seems to be a difference of opinion as to just what it is.  I have known them to come six or seven years in the same spot.

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