White Musk Mallow
I found these showy white flowers beside the road on July 24, 2025. The blossoms are quite large, almost large enough to span the palm of my hand. The overall plant wasn’t that tall, maybe a foot and a half or so.
We have sort of seen these before, I posted them previously in December of 2016, only last time they were pink! This looks to be a Musk Mallow, Malva moschata-f-alba. These are plants that were imported from Europe and escaped cultivation, and apparently this has happened locally at least twice: once with the original, pink form, and once with the white “Alba” cultivar that we see here.
I don’t think these are considered “invasive” as such, since they don’t seem to be displacing the other plants so much as co-existing with them.
With the word “Musk” in the common name, I expect that they likely have a fairly strong musky odor of some sort. Unfortunately, I didn’t sniff it, so I don’t know if it’s an odor from the flowers, or from the crushed stems/leaves, or maybe from the roots. Well, they are supposed to be perennials, so they should come back up this summer and I can sniff them then. Although, that doesn’t necessarily help anyone but me. It has become clear over the years that my sense of smell is somewhat lacking. As in, there are a lot of things that everyone else around me say have distinct odors, but don’t smell like anything to me. It’s not like I don’t have a sense of smell, there are plenty of things that I smell just fine. There are just some items in the smell library that seem to be — missing.