You can’t miss them. Drive by the Marblehead home of Pam and Paul Dougovito in July and you’ll notice the usual display of patriotic bunting, but that’s not what stops traffic. What causes the skid marks when passersby throw on the brakes is the megadose of hollyhocks beyond your wildest dreams. Imagine nine-foot spires touching the skies. Line those spikes with dozens of big, open-faced blooms in an otherworldly color range. And then multiply the whole shebang times 200 or more. Rumor has it that Marblehead was once rife with hollyhocks, but scant evidence remains except the wallop of towering blossom spires in the Dougovito front yard.
Pam admits that she didn’t see the hollyhocks coming. Sure, the house had the vestiges of some perennials in evidence when the realtor showed it off on Memorial Day of 1993. When they closed on the shoreline house in August, maybe seven or eight hollyhocks were in the picture. But coming from a hollyhock-deprived background, Pam didn’t really recognize the plants. Growing up in Ohio, she thought she’d been exposed to all aspects of gardening by the “sergeant general” of the local garden club (who came around to each home to perform white-gloved inspections and critiques), but hollyhocks were not part of the local agenda. For all those reasons, the hollyhocks took the Dougovitos by complete surprise when they began to spruce up and feed the front yard.
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