During the dog days of summer, you will find splashes of pink dotting the roadsides throughout Montauk, especially in low-lying areas on the margins of wetlands and shorelines. These lush native displays belong to the swamp rose mallow or Hibiscus moscheutos, as it is known scientifically.
The swamp rose mallow, commonly called the hardy hibiscus and marshmallow hibiscus, is a vigorous, sturdy, somewhat shrubby, and woody-based perennial of the mallow family. Its showy and somewhat exotic dinner plate-sized flowers, comprising five overlapping white or pink petals, look almost out of place among Montauk’s native reeds. The flowers last only one to two days, but new flowers open each day over a long bloom period from July to September. At the peak of the bloom season, each plant can produce 20 or more flowers per day.
The swamp rose mallow grows in wetlands and riverine systems from the Atlantic states to Texas, extending northward to Ontario. In Montauk, you will find it favoring the edges of brackish wetlands and tidal marshes, growing in large colonies along Fort Pond, Lake Montauk, and Oyster Pond, as in the above picture taken by Harry Bruno in September of 1954.
Native to this region, the swamp rose mallow was recorded in Montauk as early as 1909, when botanist Norman Taylor, curator of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, surveyed Montauk’s grasslands and forests. In a paper, The Vegetation of Montauk: A Study of Grassland and Forest, published by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1923, Taylor mentions the plant’s abundance in a kettlehole not far from the Montauk Inn. The Montauk Indians and early settlers used the root for candy, our earliest form of marshmallow, as well as for its medicinal purposes.
Being a cold-hardy perennial wetland plant makes the swamp rose mallow a sturdy, versatile choice for native plant gardeners living in low-lying areas in Montauk. It is celebrated in the Montauk Village Association’s The Salty Thumb: Your Garden by the Sea, compiled by Constance Greene and Margaret Potts in 1967, as “one of the easiest specimens to start with” when planting coastal wildflower gardens. Not only are the flowers inviting to native pollinators like bees, but the nectar attracts butterflies and ruby-throated hummingbirds. In the fall and winter, the seeds of the mallow plant provide food to over-wintering and migratory songbirds.
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