How would you like to have an edible, tasty groundcover that is easy to remove if you don’t want it, doesn’t spread asexually, is evergreen and perennial, tastes nice all year round but most delicious in winter, never gets more than about two feet tall, and is a valuable medicinal herb on top of it?
This plant is common mallow, and you may be removing it as a weed.
Marshmallow is praised for being good as a skin softener. I’m sure this is true, but I’ve never tried it, because it’s a plant that wants moist soil, and my climate’s arid. Besides, I don’t feel any particular need to, because I have volunteer hollyhocks and common mallow.
Any part of either of those plants soaked in water for a day makes for an amazing conditioner and/or lotion. Great for healing wounded parts of the body, too (perhaps because of those same moistening properties). Mallow water seems to help small cuts and scraps heal twice or even three times faster than they would otherwise, so it would probably work well for larger ones, too. Surprisingly, mallow water also works really well to help bruises deep under the skin heal, too, two or three times faster.
People talk about how great comfrey is for those purposes, but seriously . . . who needs comfrey, which is inedible and spreads by runners? You can always just use common mallow! People also talk about how great comfrey is for chop-and-drop. Well, so are weeds.
Common mallow is a tasty, vigorous, evergreen perennial groundcover that is highly drought tolerant and also highly cold tolerant. It’s easy to get rid of if it’s in a spot you don’t want – it has one deep taproot in the middle. Just yank it up (and then, if you want to, use it as mulch, soak it to make lotion, or eat it). It doesn’t create runners or otherwise spread asexually. It makes lots of seeds, but if you don’t want it to, just eat all the flowers (which taste just like the leaves, only a little bit sweet – they’re my favorite part of the plant) or seed pods (which have a nice flavor and are high in omega-3s).
If it does drop a ton of seeds in a space you don’t want, the tiny little heart-shaped cotyledons are distinctive and easy to recognize, so it’s easy to notice seedlings when they’re tiny and pull them right up. The regular leaves also have a distinctive shape, so you’re unlikely to mistake them for anything else.
On top of that, common mallow tastes nice all year round, especially in the middle of winter, when the leaves are softest and sweetest. It’s a really great plant, at least in my zone 7b climate with hot arid summers and cool wet winters.
And hollyhocks seem to be really similar, just a whole lot larger. The main differences are that hollyhock roots are more tender and therefore more palatable (they taste like slimy carrots), the leaves are rougher and therefore less palatable (so I’d rather eat common mallow leaves), and if the flowers are black-colored, they have a marshmallow flavor when dried. Both species make lots of seeds that taste pretty good and are very healthy for your body, both species are perennial, and both species are evergreen perennials that are highly heat tolerant, cold tolerant, and drought tolerant.
So if you want some tall ornamental flowers, add some hollyhocks to your garden. If you want a friendly groundcover, try common mallow. Both volunteered in my garden as weeds (the hollyhock seeds came from my neighbor’s flower bed), and now both are welcome crops that I sow seeds of whenever I have a bare space where I’d like some drought tolerant tasty perennials growing.
— but the other one survived, so I moved it to a space in dry shade, which they’re supposed to prefer.