If you are a bumblebee living near the beach and raising this year’s brood you will be glad that the purple trumpets of the tree mallows are open with their rich supply of nectar and pollen.
The area of the beach by the Belmont Hotel is set aside as a home for a range of seaside specialist plants. It is not wild but a garden managed with a light touch by volunteers from Sidmouth in Bloom and the Sid Valley Biodiversity Group. Many of these plants do not have particularly showy flowers but one of the loveliest and earliest is the tree mallow.
We have at least three different mallows in the valley but the common mallow, a roadside ‘weed’, and the pale pink and sweet smelling musk mallow open their flowers later. As the name suggests, the tree mallows grow like small trees on and near the beach. They can live for two or three years and the persistent stem looks woody.
Tree mallows have been used as cultivated garden plants for hundreds of years under their old name of lavatera. Most of the cultivated strains have pale pink flowers, but the wild plants have mauve flowers with a dark purple throat. To a bee seeing light in the UV spectrum, the dark throat has a pattern of ‘honey guides’, lines showing the bee the way to the nectar.
The flowers have five petals and an arrangement of sepals and bracts behind the flower that make a kind of ruff. The stamens are fused together like a spike in the middle of the flower. This gives it a characteristic appearance shared by other family members such as the hollyhock and hibiscus.
The word mauve is derived directly from the Latin name for mallow, malva. In 1856 William Henry Perkin was trying to synthesise quinine but his experiments produced a coloured chemical instead. This became the first artificial dye and became known as mauve because it was the same colour as the common mallow flowers.
Tree mallows were not recorded in the local Flora Sidostiensis compiled in 1849 by amateur botanists including local doctor W. H. Cullen and Lady Kennaway. It is unclear when it moved in, probably arriving by sea because the seeds can float in the sea for some time without being affected by the salt.
It is thought that tree mallows have been on the southwest coasts since the last ice age where they live in harmony with other plants, but they are now causing a problem for coastal bird colonies, particularly puffins, on some Scottish islands. A team from Aberdeen University has been studying the problem.
It is believed that the plants arrived by being planted in coastal gardens from where seeds have found their way into the sea and then to the islands. That wasn’t a problem for a long time because the plants were generally annual at those latitudes, but milder winters are allowing the plants to survive for several years producing more and more seeds. Also, the plants thrive on the supply of guano in the sea bird colonies.
This combination means the tree mallows become invasive to the extent that puffins are now struggling to dig their burrows on some islands. Coastal communities are having similar problems in New Zealand and Australia where the plant was introduced to gardens in Victorian times.
However, our beach and cliff areas are its natural home where they are making a positive contribution.
Ed Dolphin
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