Malvaviscus drummondii alba

This is the white-flowered small Turk's cap, an uncommon and quietly beautiful form of the normally scarlet Malvaviscus drummondii. The flowers keep the familiar furled, never-opening Turk's cap shape, under two inches long and produced steadily through the hot months, but open in clean, soft white rather than red, a cool and unexpected note in the summer garden.

Our plants came from the plantsman Greg Grant, of the Stephen F. Austin State University arboretum in Nacogdoches, Texas. Like the wild species, this white form is a hibiscus relative in the mallow family, Malvaceae, native to the Gulf Coast states and on south, and just as attractive to hummingbirds as the red kind. Small apple-like fruits ripen from white to red, edible and mildly sweet, and the plant self-sows gently where content.

Small Turk's cap earns its keep in the hardest parts of a Southern garden. The species is notably hardier than the larger Mexican wax mallow, Malvaviscus arboreus, and in most of the South behaves as a perennial, dying back in winter and returning from the root, growing more shrubby only in the warmest sections. Heat, drought, and dry shade are all taken in stride.

The white form is especially lovely in a shaded or evening garden, where pale flowers glow after the sun drops, and it makes a fresh companion to ferns, hostas, and other shade plants at a woodland edge or along a dry, dappled fence. Give a sunny to partly shaded spot with well-drained soil, and the shrub flowers freely even in shade, three to six feet of soft white bloom and a steady traffic of hummingbirds through the heat of the year.