Plantae > Tracheophyta > Magnoliopsida > Malvales > Malvaceae > Alcea > Alcea rosea

Alcea rosea (hollyhock)

Synonyms:

Wikipedia Abstract

Alcea rosea (common hollyhock; syn. Althaea chinensis Wall., Althaea ficifolia Cav., Althaea rosea Cav.) is an ornamental plant in the Malvaceae family. It was imported into western Europe from southwestern Asia and the Balkans during, or possibly before, the 15th century. William Turner, a herbalist of the time, gave it the name "holyoke" from which the English name derives.
View Wikipedia Record: Alcea rosea

Attributes

Allergen Potential [1]  Medium-Low
Edible [2]  May be edible. See the Plants For A Future link below for details.
Flower Type [2]  Hermaphrodite
Lifespan [2]  Perennial
Structure [3]  Herb
Usage [2]  A fibre obtained from the stems is used in papermaking; The fibres are about 1.9mm long. The stems are harvested in late summer, the leaves are removed and the stems are steamed until the fibres can be removed. The fibres are cooked with lye for 2 hours and then ball milled for 3 hours or pounded with mallets. The paper is light tan in colour; The flowers are an alternative ingredient of 'Quick Return' herbal compost activator; This is a dried and powdered mixture of several herbs that can be added to a compost heap in order to speed up bacterial activity and thus shorten the time needed to make the compost; The seed contains 12% of a drying oil; The red anthocyanin constituent of the flowers is used as a litmus; A brown dye is obtained from the petals;
Height [2]  7.872 feet (2.4 m)
Width [2]  24 inches (0.6 m)
View Plants For A Future Record : Alcea rosea

Protected Areas

Predators

Consumers

Parasitized by 
Golovinomyces orontii[5]
Leveillula taurica[5]
Puccinia malvacearum (hollyhock rust)[5]

External References

USDA Plant Profile

NatureServe Explorer

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Derived from Allergy-Free Gardening OPALS™, Thomas Leo Ogren (2000)
♦ 2Plants For A Future licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
♦ 3Kattge, J. et al. (2011b) TRY - a global database of plant traits Global Change Biology 17:2905-2935
♦ 4HOSTS - a Database of the World's Lepidopteran Hostplants Gaden S. Robinson, Phillip R. Ackery, Ian J. Kitching, George W. Beccaloni AND Luis M. Hernández
♦ 5Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics.
♦ 6New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research Plant-SyNZ™ database
♦ 7Biological Records Centre Database of Insects and their Food Plants
♦ 8Ben-Dov, Y., Miller, D.R. & Gibson, G.A.P. ScaleNet 4 November 2009
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0