Malva Zebrina

Soft lilac-pink saucers painted with deep purple veins striping outward from the centre, no two flowers marked the same. In a drift the pattern builds into something that reads as watercolour from a distance.

It is the one mallow that flowers in its first summer from an early spring sowing, which is unusual for the genus and the main practical reason to choose it. Bushy at 90 to 120cm, it goes on from early summer to the frosts, and the open flowers are among the better bumblebee plants in the garden. Flowers and young leaves are edible.

Two things. It is short-lived, two or three years, though it self-seeds so freely that a colony holds itself together and the volunteers largely keep the stripes. And it needs the midsummer chop like the rest of the family: when it goes leggy in July, cut it back by half and water it in for a second flush, because left alone it becomes woody and stops. It is genuinely unfussy about soil, taking heavy clay or dry sand so long as it drains.