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Mophead Hydrangeas (3 of 3)

From “Some Garden Pictures” in Colour in the Flower Garden by Gertrude Jekyll:

“There is a place near my house where a path leads down through a nut-walk to the further garden. It is crossed by a shorter path that ends at a Birch tree with a tall silvered trunk. It seemed desirable to accentuate the point where the paths cross; I therefore put down four square platforms of stone ‘pitching’ as a place for the standing of four Hydrangeas in tubs….

“Just before the tree is a solid wooden seat and a shallow wide step done with the same stone pitching. Tree and seat are surrounded on three sides by a rectangular planting of yews. The tender greys of the rugged lower bark of the Birch and the silvering of its upper stem tell finely against the dark velvet-like richness of the Yew and the leaf-mass of other trees beyond; the pink flowers and fresh green foliage of the Hydrangeas are also brilliant against the dusky green. It is just one simple picture that makes one glad for three months of the later summer and early autumn. The longer cross-path, which on the right leads in a few yards to steps up to the paved court on the north side of the house, on the left passes down the nut-walk… The Birch tree and seat are immediately to the right….

“Standing a little way down the shaded nut-walk and looking back, the Hydrangeas are seen in another aspect, with the steps and house behind them in shade, and the sun shining through their pale green leaves. Sitting on the seat, the eye, passing between the pink Hydrangea flowers, sees a short straight path bounded by a wall of Tree Box to right and left, and at the far end one tub of pale blue Hydrangea in shade, backed by a repetition of the screen of Yews such as enclose the Birch tree.”

From “Reading the Paper” in Ecstasy Among Ghosts: Poems by John L. Stanizzi:

Here, now, the days are long
and the leaves of the hydrangea are supple and leathery,
with raised veins like the back of a hand.
A stick-woman in an old brown dress and floppy hat
stands in the garden
and frightens the birds.
The sun dazzles away the early fog.


Hello!

This is the last of three posts featuring “hydrangibles” — an amusable I invented to describe hydrangeas with fat floaty flowers as well as fanciful imaginary sky vessels — from my garden. The previous two posts are Mophead Hydrangeas (1 of 3) and Mophead Hydrangeas (2 of 3).

The quotation at the top — from Colour in the Flower Garden by Gertrude Jekyll — is one of Jekyll’s descriptions not only of hydrangeas in her garden, but of her own photographs of hydrangeas. Jekyll — well-known as a horticulturalist, gardener, and garden writer — was an early adopter of photography and energetically embraced this emerging technology. According to the biography Gertrude Jekyll: A Vision of Garden and Wood by Judith B. Tankard, Jekyll progressed from her initial interest in photography through photographing gardens for her books, like this:

“In 1885, she took up photography, which enabled her to bring together a number of interests. After she quickly mastered the cumbersome process and set up a dark room at Munstead House, she set out to record those elements indigenous to her native Surrey that were rapidly disappearing. She was fascinated by cottage gardens and their cottagers, and by the special construction trades that gave ordinary rural buildings their local character. In addition to these vernacular traditions, she also photographed her own garden as well as specific plants and tree forms, garden design elements, and the local landscape….

“Gertrude Jekyll’s favorite brother, Sir Herbert Jekyll (1846-1932), who shared many interests and friends with her, was an art patron and engineer as well as an amateur photographer. He assembled several carefully labeled family photograph albums and was interested in the preservation of rural buildings, so it is possible that he taught her the art of photography….

“Jekyll kept prints of most of her photographs in a series of personal photograph albums similar to her brother’s. Gertrude Jekyll’s earliest attempts at photographing and processing were closely supervised by her instructor, as the back of some of the earliest prints are critiqued in a handwriting different from her own. Some are marked ‘little over exposed,’ ‘bad light,’ ‘more pyro — more bromide,’ and ‘keep the camera level.’

“Starting in 1899, with the publication of Wood and Garden, Jekyll used her photographs to illustrate her books, probably using a stock of photographs she had already taken….  [As] Jekyll began to publish books on a regular basis, she now regarded each book that she illustrated as a photo assignment….”

If you would like to view the photographs Jekyll is describing up-top (and see how well she renders the words explaining the photographs), you can find three of them at these links from a Gutenberg edition of Colour in the Flower Garden:

Steps and Hydrangeas
Hydrangea Tubs and Birch-Tree Seat
Hydrangea Tubs and Nut Walk

If you page backward a bit from the last link (to the chapter title “Some Garden Pictures”), you’ll also encounter what could certainly be considered Jekyll’s artist statement, one which combines art, gardening, and the color, light, and compositional characteristics of photography:

“When the eye is trained to perceive pictorial effect, it is frequently struck by something — some combination of grouping, lighting and colour — that is seen to have that complete aspect of unity and beauty that to the artist’s eye forms a picture. Such are the impressions that the artist-gardener endeavours to produce in every portion of the garden…. [There] are some days during the summer when the quality of light seems to tend to an extraordinary beauty of effect. I have never been able to find out how the light on these occasions differs from that of ordinary fine summer days, but, when these days come, I know them and am filled with gladness.”

What a delightful way to describe how we see — and photograph — gardens, and I especially like how Jekyll blends sensory elements of art, botany, and photography in her writing. Now, imagine: if she’d been writing and taking garden photographs a hundred years later, she might have ended out with a blog, just like this!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!








Mophead Hydrangeas (2 of 3)

From “Stourton House” in Other People’s Gardens by Christopher Lloyd:

Stourton House, near to Mere in Wiltshire, is next to the car-park serving the famous National Trust property of Stourhead. It couldn’t be more different: warm, personal, sometimes verging on the chaotic, but entirely lovable…. The garden is largely geared to the production of material for [Elizabeth Bullivant’s] dried flower (and fruit) business. I am told that you can hardly move, in the house, for the quantities of drying and dried flowers hanging up….

“Across the lawn is the woodland garden. From the outside you are chiefly aware of large old rhododendron bushes and a frieze of hydrangeas, somewhat jostled, in front. Hydrangeas are a principal theme at Stourton House, being greatly valued for drying. In her book, Elizabeth is at pains to describe exactly the right stage at which to cull them for this purpose. Half this garden — the half I have so far been describing — is on neutral or alkaline soil, which tends to produce pink or red hydrangea flowers (those that are not white), while the other half, mainly comprising the woodland, with its rhododendrons and azaleas and the bulk of the hydrangea collection, gives rise to blue or purple hydrangea flowers.

“At an RHS autumn show, quite recently, Elizabeth brought up a vase of ‘Hamburg’ hydrangea heads. This is a large-flowered, bun-headed hortensia. In colour, according to the age of the inflorescence, whether it grew on acid or alkaline soil and whether in sun or in shade, the flowers ranged from green to purple and deep bricky red, through deep blue and deep pink. All the colours were intense, but they varied to this amazing degree….

“Truly the hydrangea is versatile, especially when you add to its variability the differences between a bun-shaped inflorescence or a conical, and a head packed with sterile florets or a flat-topped lacecap wherein the sterile florets are arranged in an outer ring, while the central disc consists entirely of tiny fertile flowers.”

From “Hydrangea” in The Japanese Haiku by Kenneth Yasuda:

Underneath the eaves
A blooming large hydrangea
Overbrims its leaves.


Hello!

This is the second of three posts featuring hydrangibles from my garden. You do not know what is a hydrangible, you say? Then you should read the first post in this series, Mophead Hydrangeas (1 of 3).

Thanks for taking a look!








Mophead Hydrangeas (1 of 3)

From “Hydrangea” in Ornamental Shrubs by Jaroslav Hofman:

“The name of this plant originated from the Greek words ‘hydor’ meaning water and ‘angeion’ meaning vessel, with reference to the fact that the shrub requires adequate water for successful growth. It is known as the Hortensia, the name having been conferred by the discoverer of the shrub in China in 1767, namely the French physician and botanist Filibert Commerson. The Hydrangea was brought to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for the first time by Sir Joseph Banks in 1789….

“The Hydrangea has been cultivated since ancient times in China and Japan. The first shrub of this species to be brought to Great Britain was apparently also a cultivated and not a wild type. Its flowers were red, its umbels composed mainly of sterile flowers. The new shrub aroused great interest at that time with its outstanding beauty. Through cultivation and cross-breeding new forms were produced, but at first the growers were unable to attain much diversity of colour, dull, pinkish-red or pale pink predominating….


“Indeed the Hydrangea resisted all attempts to improve it for a long time. It was only after the importing of a glowing-red variety from Japan (the ‘Rosea’ variety) and its cross-breeding with ‘Otaksa’ [that] French horticulturists… succeeded from 1910 onwards in breeding a large number of new forms differing not only in colour, but also in shape, which surprised visitors to the horticultural exhibition taking place in Paris at the time. Further progress was achieved when it was discovered that the Hydrangea reacted strongly to certain chemicals in the soil by a sudden change of colour in its flowers. For example, it was found that iron or ammonia in the soil fostered the growth of blue flower-heads, formerly a very rare phenomenon in this flower.”

From “Hydrangea” in Tremulous Hinge: Poems by Adam Giannelli:

Water vessel — patina of summer —
its zeppelins soar all the way
into September, the heads colored
like the flavored ice atop snow cones….


Beside a driveway and a house,
a few orbs, flamingo-like, float
on thin stalks. Others, laden
with bloom, rest, like tails of tired poodles, on the ground.

Each mophead is a bevy, a beveled blue,
a standing ovation,
that fumes with lattices of spume, solid but fretful, like sleep.
I never knew that ecstasy
could arrive at
so many angles….


Hello!

When I moved into my house in 2004, there were two batches of hydrangeas in the back yard, one on each side of the steps leading to the courtyard. All of them produced flowers in the “mophead” shape, a descriptor used to differentiate them from hydrangea flowers of the “lacecap” style, like the Bluebird Hydrangeas I added to the garden myself. “Mophead hydrangea” is also a common stand-in name for hydrangea varieties that produce flowers like this.

The came-with-the-house hydrangeas were a mix of several varieties (probably Hydrangea paniculata, Hydrangea arborescens, and Hydrangea macrophylla) but since I wasn’t sure of their identities, I got into the habit of calling them all “hydrangibles” — a word I made up that combines “hydrangea” and “dirigible” in honor of their large, floppy blooms that seem to float above the leaves. Imagine my surprise to find the poem I excerpted above, where the poet describes hydrangeas as “zeppelins” — since zeppelins are a kind of dirigible and the poem evokes the same “floating above the garden” imagery I was going for with “hydrangible.”

About half of the hydrangibles got frozen out a couple of years ago, during two weeks of plant-destroying deep-freezes we had around the winter holidays. When spring came, those that didn’t die behaved very badly, producing only a handful of new stems pointing in all sorts of odd directions (as hydrangeas often do), and developing only a few anemic flowers. This year, though, they did quite a bit better — so I got them to pose for a couple of photo-shoots and their flowers were big and floppy enough that I could refer to them as hydrangibles once again.

While working on the photographs, I wondered if I could pretend there was a real-life people-moving vessel that might be called a “hydrangible” — since, you know, it’s quite common that our plant names (even imaginary ones) are based on something else. So I went to Adobe Firefly (which I wrote about here and here, and haven’t used since) and asked it to generate “a photograph of a dirigible that’s covered with hydrangea flowers, flying over the city of Atlanta” — and it produced for me these five images…

… which obviously prove that hydrangibles capable of flying people around in the clouds actually do exist, because, hey, the internet “knows” about them. Now I just need to figure out where these hydrangibles take off from so I can go for a ride, and would especially like to fly over (and hang out at) the fanciful lake and park in the last image, as I didn’t even know about that lovely body of water and greenspace smack-dab in the middle of downtown Atlanta.

🙂

Thanks for reading and taking a look!








Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ (2 of 2)

From “H. Serrata ‘Bluebird'” in 1001 Plants to Dream of Growing, edited by Liz Dobbs:

“A delightful summer-flowering shrub, H. serrata ‘Bluebird’ is the perfect choice for any garden that does not have the space for one of the larger lacecap hydrangea varieties. ‘Bluebird’ is a slender shrub, with upright tan-colored stems and painted dark-green leaves flushed purple red. In midsummer the delicate lacecap flower heads appear; these are purple-pink on alkaline soils, but bright gentian-blue on acidic soils. Each flower head consists of a flattened cluster of tiny fertile florets surrounded by larger, showier, sterile or ray florets. ‘Bluebird, along with other H. serrata varieties, has smaller, more refined flower heads than familiar lacecap hydrangeas. As the season progresses, the color of the flowers changes to purple-green, and the wine-red color of the foliage becomes more intense toward fall.

“‘Bluebird’ is a lovely hydrangea to grow in sun or in light shade with perennials and roses. Its compact habit makes it suitable for narrow borders….
H. serrata ‘Tiara’ is similar in habit to ‘Bluebird, but it has more sterile florets in each flower head. The flower color is more mauve, and the fall foliage more intensely crimson in the sun. H. serrata ‘Rosalba’ has fewer, large sterile florets, which are initially white but soon change to crimson. Its fall foliage is rich purple-red. H. serrata ‘Miranda’ has very dome-shaped flower heads, which turn a vibrant shade of blue in acidic conditions.”

From Seasons of Light: A Collection of Haiku by Dermot O’Brien:

The withered blossom
on a bedraggled hydrangea
surprised by purple buds


Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ — from my garden. The first post is Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ (1 of 2).

I took most of these photos a little later in the season than those in the previous post, and — as is described in the quotation at the top — you can see how many of the tiny flowers have shifted color from mostly-blue toward a mix of purple, pink, and light green. I had actually thought the color-shift was from soil variations (as hydrangeas are known for their fascinating color changes), but this may be a late-summer seasonal change, since mine are all planted together.

If you’d like to see the color variations presented by some of the Bluebird’s close relatives (those mentioned in 1001 Plants to Dream of Growing above), click these links:

H. serrata ‘Tiara’
H. serrata ‘Rosalba’
H. serrata ‘Miranda’

Rosalba looks especially scrumptious: that mix of red and pink among the flowers and the florets (which are white or very light blue in the Bluebird hydrangea) may just earn them a place in my garden next year.

Thanks for taking a look!








Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ (1 of 2)

From “Hydrangea serrata” in Hydrangeas: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden by Naomi Slade:

“A near neighbour and relative of H. macrophylla, H. serrata hails from the wooded mountains of Japan and Korea, where it is sometimes called ‘tree of heaven’. In the uplands, well away from the sea, temperatures often dip below freezing so, for garden purposes, it is noticeably hardier than its cousin….

“While the vulnerability of
H. macrophylla comes from the length of its growing season, starting too early and going on too late, H. serrata has a much shorter growth period so it is hardier in the face of cold — although it is no fan of blazing sun.

“Like
H. macrophylla, H. serrata likes partial or dappled shade so it can be used in a similar way in the garden. It is less tolerant of exposed, windy or very warm locations and it doesn’t thrive in wet soils, which makes it less suited to coastal and boggy sites. On the other hand, the plants tend to be smaller, at around 100cm (40in) tall, so are suitable for compact modern gardens.

“The species has lacecap flowers and serrated leaves — hence the name — and does well under trees. A number of cultivars, specifically Grayswood, Preziosa and Glyn Church will go through several colour changes throughout the season — but since they are not susceptible to pH, these are consistent in their inconsistency. The white cultivars will remain white regardless of soil pH, but the other pink and blue cultivars are moderately susceptible, so situations arise where, for example, Bluebird, grown on alkaline soil, will produce flowers that are noticeably pink.”

From The Windbreak Pine: New and Uncollected Haiku by Wally Swist, edited by John Barlow:

the deepening blush
of hydrangea flowers
late August chill


Hello!

Here we have the first of two posts featuring Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ — most commonly referred to as the Bluebird Hydrangea — from my garden. I have about six of these plants at a boundary between shade and sun in my back yard, where most of the time, they seem pretty happy. They bloomed well for several years running, then they got frozen and failed to bloom for one season, then this year returned once again. I always like to see them in early summer, and they look especially nice in late afternoon and early evening, when their white florets glow and the cluster of blue and pink flowers look more saturated as the sun goes down.

The part of this lacecap-style hydrangea that usually catches the eye includes both the cluster of tiny flowers at the center and the white florets that seem to float around them. Technically, only the lacecap portion contains flowers; the white florets are produced (the hydrangea tells me) to demand the attention of pollinators by providing some white-on-dark contrast.

These baby Bluebirds can be hard to photograph, and when I look at their photos from previous years, I see that I’ve often struggled to get the colors and focus right. Focusing at close range is difficult because the cluster of flowers may extend five inches or more from front to back, and the flowers in the cluster are extra-tiny, entangled with each other, and hard to differentiate in the camera’s viewfinder. And they move easily in the wind, making my eyes wobble.

Examine, if you like, the first two photographs, and you’ll see what I mean: the foreground white floret is in focus as are some of the blue flowers, but as the distance from the camera increases, the cluster of flowers becomes blurrier as do the two background florets. If I use a narrower aperture, I can get more of the flower cluster in focus — but then too much of the background also ends out in focus and it becomes difficult to separate the flowers from the background.

As you move through the galleries below, you can see how I handled that: by either moving in closer and eliminating many of the wee flowers from the image; or by moving back and taking a wider shot, where the fact that some of the flowers are out of focus becomes less apparent. I have sometimes tried adding LED light or using a flash, but then they look like they’re studio portraits rather than nature photos. So while I wasn’t entirely satisfied with these images, I decided to post them despite being unable to achieve perfection — whatever that is!

Thanks for taking a look!