“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.”
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).
“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.”
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.
“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.”
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:
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.
