Northshore Home

Spring 2016

Northshore Home magazine highlights the best in architectural design, new construction and renovations, interiors, and landscape design.

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30 SPRING 2016 Y OU 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 bunt- ing, 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 Marble- head 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 com- ing. Sure, the house had the vestiges of some perenni- als in evidence when the realtor showed it off on Me- morial 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. Of course, the stacks of stakes in the garage should have clued them in. But still, it wasn't until Pam and Paul started tilling the soil, adding compost, and prep- ping the beds that the full potential of the hollyhock haven started to manifest. Suddenly, when treated well, the hollyhocks spiraled into multiplication frenzy. Their population doubled, tripled, and spun out from there. Pretty soon, not only could Pam identify hollyhocks at all their stages of development, but her summers morphed into a one-woman community ser- vice project. She became the unofficial steward of the Marblehead hollyhock brigade. Amazingly, Pam never planted a single hollyhock seed. Instead, she just took the resident hollyhocks under her wing with generous doses of compost, strict disease control measures, and slavish staking. Appar- ently, the hollyhock seeds were just biding their time, slumbering under the soil, waiting for a gardener to rush to their rescue. The result is stupendous. One hol- lyhock is an impressive spectacle, with its flamboyant flowers on spires that look like nature's rendition of a lighthouse. But 200 (and counting) hollyhocks march- nshoremag.com/nshorehome/ cultivate There are well over 200 individual hollyhock plants on the property.

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