Swamp rose-mallow, 29th of August 2017.
Watercolor, 17 x 20 cm.
Swamp rose-mallow is a popular garden flower. Perhaps also because it is apparently not too difficult to grow and breed. I do not intend, of course, to
underestimate the effort of my mother whose garden is full of these flowers (photographed below), but I noticed that they are all quite strong, healthy and that
there are plenty of them - almost everywhere she planted them.
Each flower is a bit different. Some are almost completely white, with a gentle periodic wrinkling of petals which produce only a slight shadowy variation of the
whiteness. Others are mostly white, but deeply maroon around the center. Some have, as the one I painted above, pronounced reddish venation which is particularly
prominent on the whiteness of the flower and in a blueish shadow. There are also violet and red flowers. All the flowers I saw had five petals which are clearly
discernible once the flower fully opens. Variations of swamp rose-mallow (which is also called Canadian hibiscus in Croatia) may be a consequence of its
fairly easy crossing with several other sorts of hibiscus, so that, strictly speaking, I cannot be completely sure that the one of mine, painted above, is a pure
swamp rose-mallow, Hibiscus moscheutos.
A single flower endures in its full strength only a day - soon after it completely opens, it starts closing, forming a tube-like shape, its edges get brown and it
dries off. But, on a same stem, other flowers grow from buds which are yet to open. On my painting one can discern three buds, one of them is just beginning to open and
one can see a bit of its red interior. A pencil sketch and a watercolor application on a flower were finished in a single session which lasted for about two hours. In the
following day I painted the stem, flowers and shadows which were fixed in a pencil sketch the day before.
The image below does not feature Hibiscus moscheutos but another sort of hibiscus - Hibiscus syriacus. This hibiscus does not originate from Syria, but its
name remained as it is due to the mistake of Linnaeus who gave it the name. The leaves of Syrian hibiscus are quite different from the swamp one, but the flowers differ
less. The image was published in the book J. Lindley and J. Paxton Paxton's Flower Garden (1850).
>> Joseph Paxton (1803 - 1865) was a famous English gardener, perhaps best known as a designed of the Crystal Palace,
a huge greenhouse (92000 m2) which hosted >> The Great Exhibition (1851). For the design of
delicate structures of prefabricated greenhouses Paxton was inspired by plants, e.g. from the leaf of a gigantic water-lily Victoria regia, a famous and a spectacular
success and pride of Victorian botany, hosted in a specially designed greenhouse which was built by Paxton himself. The leaves of this plant species (Victoria amazonica)
can grow to an enormous size of 3 m in diameter.
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Last updated on 29th of August 2017.