Most Interesting Hibiscus Cousins
As hibiscus lovers, many of us continually search out and study all the different species and varieties of our beloved hibiscus plants. It's a subject of near obsession for us at HVH! But one thing many hibiscus lovers may not realize is that hibiscus are part of a huge and important family of plants known as the Malvaceae, or in simple English, the Mallow plants. All mallows make five-petaled flowers and five-section seed pods, just like hibiscus do. Some of the most common mallows, such as the "Common Mallow" itself, look very much like hibiscus. But other cousins to hibiscus are strange, different, and unexpected wonders. We thought you might enjoy learning a bit about the mallow family and seeing some of the most interesting cousins to our hibiscus plants.
The Mallows ~ Edible, Medicinal, Sticky, Gooey Flowering Plants
Mallows are a fun family because some of our most beloved things come from them. You might recognize the old-fashioned word mucilage and remember using brown mucilage glue in school if you're old enough. Mucilage is the sticky, milky substance in the sap of all mallows. It's what gets on your hands and makes them sticky when you handle hibiscus leaves or flowers. Mallows, cactus, and succulents are all very high in mucilage, and yes, mucilage glue is made from them. It's one of the earliest glues that early humans discovered and used. It tends to be brittle and crumble away, as many of us discovered with our childhood art, so modern glues have replaced mucilage glues. But, if you're ever in a jam and need to make an impromptu sticky note, keep in mind that your sticky hibiscus plant can give you just the "stick" you need!
This mucilage that is such a hallmark of mallow plants is also used for food and medicine. One food that leaps to mind when you hear the word "mallow" is marshmallows. Amazingly, marshmallows are a 4000-year-old food going back to ancient Egyptians who squeezed the sap out of mallow plants that grew in local marshes, then added honey and nuts to make a sweet dessert which they named for the "marsh mallow" flower. We no longer use mallow mucilage to make modern marshmallows, but it might be fun for some adventurous hibiscus lover to try out the ancient Egyptian recipe sometime.
Mucilage is a form of soluble fiber that humans have used for thousands of years to soothe the tummy. It coats the lining of the digestive tract and protects it from irritants and microbes. We drink aloe vera juice and eat chia seeds for their mucilage, and in ancient times mallow plants were used all over the world for their medicinal mucilage.
In our modern world though, mallow plants tend to be used more in cosmetic face creams, because we now prefer that kind of gooey-ness spread on our skin rather than inside our digestive tract. Still, it serves the same purpose of soothing and protecting.
So now let's take a look at a few of the most interesting cousins of our beloved hibiscus plants . . .
Ancient Hibiscus Cousin - The Baobab Tree
It's hard to believe that this gigantic tree could be a cousin to our hibiscus plants, but the genes prove that it is. Baobab trees are commonly called The Tree of Life because, like all mallows, they have thick, gooey mucilage that they use to fill their trunks with water, then swell the trunks to hold even more water. Many baobabs also create an extra hollow space inside their trunks that collect rainwater as it falls before it even hits the ground. Their mucilage then preserves the water, keeping it fresh and drinkable for several months at a time. So baobab trees are a perpetual source of water for humans who have been tapping them during times of drought for thousands of years. Like most mallow plants, all parts of the baobab tree are also edible, from roots, to leaves, to young saplings, and most notably, to their copious fruits that stay fresh hanging from tree branches long after the trees have dropped their leaves for the winter. All of this makes the baobab a true Tree of Life on every level for people who live in the hot arid plains of places like Africa.
The baobab is a special tree on many other levels too:
- It is one of the three bulkiest trees on the planet. The giant trunks grow as wide as 34 feet (10m) in diameter.
- It is also one of the longest living trees. Some currently living trees are already more than 1000 years old, and the oldest known baobab tree is estimated to be 1275 years old.
- Baobab trees are found in Africa, Madagascar and Australia with notably similar DNA, which means that these trees evolved before the ancient continent Gondwana was broken up, more than 180 million years ago, making baobab trees one of the most ancient flowering trees on our planet. In every way, it is one of our most special hibiscus cousins, and certainly deserves the name The Tree of Life!
The baobab flower is huge and extremely fragrant, attracting large numbers of fruit bats who are its natural pollinators. We have long suspected that some sort of fruit bat was also the ancient natural pollinator of hibiscus flowers, so hibiscus and baobab have this in common. If only hibiscus flowers had the fragrance of their baobab cousins!
Chocolate ~ Drink of the Gods!
Amazingly, our favorite food, chocolate, is cousin to our favorite flower too! Cacao trees are also in the mallow family, and as we know, they certainly have some magical properties. There is evidence of ancient Olmecs drinking hot cocoa in their pottery cups as early as 1500 BC in the rainforests of the Yucatán where cacao trees grew wild. Olmecs eventually shared their cocoa drink with Mayans, who spread it across Central America. In those times, cocoa was a very spiritual drink, drunk without any sweetening, and used only in religious ceremonies among the leaders of the Mayan and Olmec worlds. When Europeans invaded the Americas and discovered the drink, they took it back to Europe where, without spiritual limitations, honey or sugar were added, and the exquisitely addictive substance we now call "chocolate" was born.
Cocao pods were extremely precious to the Olmec and Mayas. They were saved, treasured, and carried around by the wealthy to be used as currency for trading, paying debts, for bribes, gifts for royalty, or to placate tribal leaders, including European army leaders when they began to arrive in the Americas. We treasure our chocolate in the modern world too, beyond a doubt. We definitely use it for trade at times, frequently for bits of bribery, and for gifts on almost every holiday. Most of us even have to admit to using chocolate to placate a truculent boss from time to time. But who knew that this kind of choco-currency has been going on for at least 1500 years here in the Americas? We may as well embrace it as one of our grand new-world traditions!
Cotton ~ The Miracle Fiber
Cotton is another strange and interesting hibiscus cousin. It may be the first fiber ever used by humans to make fabric and clothing. Silk is known to be have been used between 6000 and 7000 years ago, but older pieces of cotton fabric have been found by archaeologists in caves in Oaxaca, Mexico and carbon-dated to be more than 7000 years old. Additionally, archaeologists have found other evidence of cotton cultivation, seeds and fibers, clear across the world dating to about 7000 years ago in Pakistan, and woven pieces of cotton fabric there in the same area that are about 6000 years old. So cotton has been cultivated and used continuously by humans on both sides of world for at least 7000 years, making it the oldest non-food cultivated human crop.
Like cocoa seeds, cotton was considered a precious material, saved by royalty, used as currency, and traded for luxury goods among the Mayas and Aztecs. Special dyes made cotton articles even more valuable. At the time of the European arrivals, Aztec kings would offer cotton as gifts to their noble friends, or to pay off extortionist European army leaders.
The cotton flower looks very much like a small hibiscus flower, and the seed pod looks a lot like a hibiscus seed pod. But cotton plants have a special kind of fruit, called a cotton boll that is unique among plants. The boll protects the seed pod until it is large and tough enough, then the boll flies off and in wild cotton, it carries some of the seeds away with it, dispersing them to new locations.
Cotton is a high-cash crop for sure! The boll is harvested to produce cotton fabric - this much we all know. But cottonseed is also a huge cash crop. It is crushed into cotton seed oil and a mash that is fed to livestock, and pays very well. What most of us don't realize is that a cotton plant actually produces at least as much cottonseed as cotton fiber. So both products are equally valuable and important as commercial crops.
Balsa ~ The World's Lightest Wood
And Open-Bar Nights for Monkeys!
Balsa trees are native to the Americas and grow from Brazil to Mexico. Balsa wood is one of the lightest woods on Earth, but unlike other light woods, it is very, very strong, and it is actually considered a hardwood because of its strength. The light wood comes from the rapid growth of this hibiscus cousin. The trees can grow as tall as 100 feet high (30m) in only 10-15 years! The wood is lighter even than cork, which means it floats even better than cork. So it is highly prized for building boat hulls and decks, as well as laminate floors, ping-pong paddles, car floorboards, along with fun things like model parts and popsicle sticks!
Balsas bloom during the dry season when most other rainforest plants have finished all their blooming, when all the other fruits are gone, and only the balsa trees remain like a kind of huge dessert plant for the long, barren dry season. Balsa trees flower with highly cupped and upright flowers that are filled with nectar, forming a large pool of sweet, nutritious nectar in each flower. The giant brown fuzzy Q-tip-looking buds pop open into large, heavily scented flowers at sunset, just in time to draw the nocturnal feeding animals. Bats and insects come to drink the nectar from time to time, as we would expect with most mallow flowers, but the main balsa nectar "guzzlers" are capuchin monkeys, and little raccoon-like mammals called olingos and kinkajous.
The balsa flower in the photo above at right shows a very upright presentation and a highly cupped flower that holds a pool of nectar that is a full inch deep, providing a sweet treat for the rainforest capuchins, olingos, and kinkajous. The flowers are so big that the little mammals can poke their heads completely into the flower. Each tree is covered with hundreds of flowers during the blooming season. But each flower is not good for only a single guzzler. As soon as a monkey drinks all the nectar in a flower and moves away to another flower, the empty flower refills with nectar again! Each flower can refill itself multiple times in one night. The balsa tree must feel like a free bar at a huge wedding for the rainforest animals!
Okra ~ The World's Strangest Vegetable
(Well Actually it's a Fruit!)
And then there's Okra . . . perhaps not nature's most delicious fruit. But . . . if gooey, slimy insides with crunchy fried outside makes you happy, then this may be the hibiscus cousin for you.
Also, if you have never experienced the true taste sensation of mucilage, okra will give you that experience in every single slippery, gooey, slimy bite.
As to more information about this very strange veggie, let us only say . . .
. . . if you can't say sumthin' nice, don't say nothin' at all.
Full stop.
(Please pardon us if you love okra!)
Last but Not Least ~ Hollyhocks, a Spring Riot of Color
One of spring's most joyous celebrations, hollyhocks bloom like crazy in late May and June, spreading their seeds everywhere each year, and popping up more and more in each successive year. Sadly, they only last a short time. Hollyhocks bloom out very quickly, then the plants die back to the ground and disappear for another year (or two years - some are biennial and only bloom every two years.) But what a glorious time it is when they are in full bloom!
- Baum, David; Small, Randall and Wendel, Jonathan. Biogeography and Floral Evolution of Baobabs (Adansonia , Bombacaceae) as Inferred From Multiple Data Sets, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University Herbaria, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA; E-mail: dbaum@oeb.harvard.edu, Department of Botany, Bessey Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA
- Berry, Paul E. (Undated). Malvaceae plant family, Retrieved May 31, 2019, from https://www.britannica.com/plant/Malvaceae#ref992590 .
- POWO. (2019). Theobroma cocao L., Plants of the World Online. Facilitated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Published on the Internet; http://www.plantsoftheworldonline.org/, Retrieved 31 May 2019, from http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:320783-2#image-gallery .
- Garthwatie, Josie (February 12, 2015). What We Know About the Earliest History of Chocolate, Smithonian.com, Retrieved 13 June, 2019 from
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/archaeology-chocolate-180954243/ .
- National Cotton Council of America. (Undated). The story of cotton, Retrieved May 31, 2019, from http://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/story/ .
- National Cotton Council of America. (Undated). Cottonseed, Retrieved May 31, 2019, from http://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/fieldtofabric/cottonseed.cfm .
- Maestri, Nicoletta. (2018, September 21). The domestication history of cotton (Gossypium): The four different ancient strands of cotton domestication, Retrieved May 31, 2019, from https://www.thoughtco.com/domestication-history-of-cotton-gossypium-170429 .
- Azuero Earth Project. (2014, March 10). March's tree of the month: The Balsa (Ochroma Pyramidale), Retrieved May 31, 2019, from https://azueroearthproject.org/2014/03/10/march-tree-month-balsa/ .
- Angier, Natalie and Ziegler, Christian. (2011, May) Open All Night, Retrieved June 13, 2019, from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/05/panama-ochroma/ .
Early Summer Hibiscus Care
Early Summer Hibiscus Blooms in our Greenhouse
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Summer is almost here and it's time to get ready for the high summer heat that's sure to come. Summer care varies depending on the region to some extent, but there are some universal things that all of us need to make sure we do in early summer.
Check your Pot Sizes
If your plants are in pots and you've moved the pots outside for the summer, make sure they are big enough to accommodate the heat in your region. There is nothing more miserable for both hibiscus and human than pots that dry out in a few hours and need more water. Early summer is the ideal time to transplant to a larger pot if your hibiscus is sucking up all its water too quickly!
But, on the other hand, don't transplant if your plant is doing fine in its existing pot! Only transplant if your plant is really too big for its pot. If you transplant a plant when it is still too small, you risk causing root infections from water that sits in the pot and "sours" because the roots can't use it all. There are two basic rules you should always follow when transplanting:
- The plant should be so big that it is tipping its pot over before you transplant so that it's very hard to keep the pot upright.
- Always pot up just one pot size. This means the diameter of the new pot should be only 2" (5 cm) larger than the diameter of the old pot.
If you follow these two rules, your hibiscus will sail through transplanting!
Do NOT Prune
This is NOT the time to prune though. Pruning needs to be done in late March or early April, so the plants have time to grow back before summer. If you prune now, you won't see any flowers for 3-4 months. Plus, you never want to prune and transplant at the same time, since both activities greatly stress plants.
Check your Watering System
If you grow your hibiscus in the ground, and use a drip system, it's time to turn on your system and check all your emitters and the wells around the base of each of your plants. Make sure that the wells haven't been ruined by gophers or weather, that your emitters are all working, and that the water is falling inside the wells instead of shooting out of the wells. It's a pain to check each emitter and well, especially if you have a large hibiscus garden! But if you don't find out about a problem this way, you'll find out about it when a plant starts dying, which is something none of us wants!
Increase your Watering
If your drip or water system is on a timer, it's time to increase your watering frequency on your timer. In most hot places, hibiscus will need to be watered daily in normal summer heat, and twice daily when temps go over 100°F (38°C). Extra water helps hibiscus survive super high heat, so in a place like Arizona, twice daily watering is the summer norm.
Adjust Sunlight
If your plants are in pots and you live in a very hot place, it's also time to move your hibiscus out of full sun to a place where they only get morning sun, then are in bright shade for the rest of the day, such as under the eastern edge of a covered patio or of a shady tree. If you live in a cold northern place, gradually get your hibiscus used to more and more sun until you get them in full sun for as much of the day as you can, so you will maximize the number of flowers your plants are able to produce.
Use Systemic, Prentative Pest Control
One more thing you may want to do is to provide some systemic, preventative pest control, like Bayer Tree and Shrub, to prevent aphids, whiteflies, mealybugs and snow scale in advance of anything that could find its way into your garden. One dose now and another in the fall is all your plants will need to prevent all these bugs.
Fertilize!
And of course, fertilize! Remember that your plants will need more fertilizer and booster throughout the summer months to maximize both growth and blooming. So the more often you can fertilize, the happier your plants will be!
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