- Graham Finney
Answer: Hollyhock rust (technically, the fungus Puccinia malvacearum) is one of the most deflating maladies out there, since it seems unstoppable. Your tactic of waiting several years to try hollyhocks again was quite sound - unfortunately, you chose excessively wet 2009.

The fungus loves wet conditions, and also crowding. A nice, dry summer with lots of room for air circulation among plants is what hollyhocks really need. When watering in a dry season, be sure not to wet the foliage, since that will spread rust the same way that too much rain will.

Tidiness is another essential. Vigilant removal of crummy leaves (rust infected or not), from both the plant and the ground is required (put them in a sealed bag in the trash; do not compost). At the end of the season, or late winter at the latest, get rid of all remaining stalks, etc.

The classic preventive treatment is wettable sulfur. It should be sprayed on the plants before any rust has appeared, with periodic reapplication if there is any sign of rust.

Then there is this wholly organic tactic that gets rave reviews in Web chains and the like: cornmeal. I have not tried this, so am only passing along what I've read. To wit: Sprinkle cornmeal generously on the soil around hollyhocks when planting or when self-sown seedlings emerge and reapply often during the growing season.

Even though you would reasonably expect to have broken the rust cycle by not growing hollyhocks for a few years, there are other plants that are hosts for the fungus. They are not as severely affected, but the spores from them can find your oh-so-vulnerable hollyhocks. The other host plants include all mallows and hibiscus. Notable among the latter is rose-of-sharon, Hibiscus syriacus, which in many older neighborhoods is as inescapable as weeds.

Q: I had my daffodils replanted two years ago, and I have only had three blooms out of 100. The leaves came up and were healthy and vigorous. Alas, no blooms. Are the bulbs planted too deep? I had moved them to a new sunny location with good drainage to try to solve the problem.

- Michael Blakeney
A: It's not at all unheard of for repositioned narcissus to take a couple of years to resume full flowering. Unless they are preposterously deep (more than a foot), that should not be an issue.

When transplanting narcissus, the bulbs should be separated. Even in a less-than-optimal site, the bulbs have been forming small offset bulbs each year, and things could be getting very crowded. By separating the bulbs, some of which can be rather small, and spacing them 3 to 8 inches apart, they will have room to flourish. The little ones take a while to get up to blooming size.

Any established clump of daffodils that blooms poorly but has lots of foliage is almost certainly in need of lifting and separating. Gardeners who mark their bulbs with ID stakes are always better positioned for summer or fall division. If one just "remembers" where the bulbs are, the odds of slicing them with shovel or trowel are higher.

One of the happy consequences of the mild and moist late spring and early summer was that daffodil foliage stayed green roughly a month longer than usual. That means a substantial increase in strength-building photosynthesis. I anticipate that 2010 will be a splendid year for spring bulbs as a result.

- Michael Martin Mills