The Mallow is the common roadside weed (Malva sylvestris), which is not altogether useless in medicine, though the Marsh Mallow far surpasses it in this respect. Ben Jonson speaks of it as an article of food—

The Fox, act i, sc. 1.

It is not easy to believe that our common Wild Mallow was so used, and Jonson probably took the idea from Horace—

But the common Mallow is a dear favourite with children, who have ever loved to collect, and string, and even eat its "cheeses:" and these cheeses are a delight to others besides children. Dr. Lindley, certainly one of the most scientific of botanists, can scarcely find words to express his admiration of them. "Only compare a vegetable cheese," he says, "with all that is exquisite in marking and beautiful in arrangement in the works of man, and how poor and contemptible do the latter appear.... Nor is it alone externally that this inimitable beauty is to be discovered; cut the cheese across, and every slice brings to view cells and partitions, and seeds and embryos, arranged with an unvarying regularity, which would be past belief if we did not know from experience, how far beyond all that the mind can conceive, is the symmetry with which the works of Nature are constructed."

As a garden plant of course the Wild Mallow has no place, though the fine-cut leaves and faint scent of the Musk Mallow (M. moschata) might demand a place for it in those parts where it is not wild, and especially the white variety, which is of the purest white, and very ornamental. But our common Mallow is closely allied to some of the handsomest plants known. The Hollyhock is one very near relation, the beautiful Hibiscus is another, and the very handsome Fremontia Californica is a third that has only been added to our gardens during the last few years. Nor is it only allied to beauty, for it also claims as a very near relation a plant which to many would be considered the most commercially useful plant in the world, the Cotton-plant.