"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Category: my garden

Baby Bluebird … Hydrangeas (2 of 2)

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From 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells:

“Garden hydrangeas will turn from pink to blue if the soil is acid and if aluminum is available to them, but it still seems rather magical, and when they were first introduced it was inexplicable. It was initially thought that they might take their color from their surroundings, especially as cuttings from a plant of one color might well turn out the other color when propagated.”

From Hydrangeas by Naomi Slade:

“When the first Asian hydrangea reached maturity in The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the late 1700s, the flowers caused a sensation when their original colour gradually changed — as if by magic.

“Widely believed to be unique to hydrangeas, this chromatic instability is one of the plant’s most memorable characteristics, and it comes down to the availability of aluminium ions in the soil.

“Acid soils … contain aluminium ions in a form that the plant can absorb and then use to produce the pigment for blue blooms. Alkaline soils … and those that are high in phosphate ‘lock up’ the aluminium so the ions are unavailable to the plant. As a result, the same variety will produce flowers that are pink or mauve. The more acid your soil is, therefore, the more clear and intense the blue colour will be.

“Hydrangeas can take several years to settle into a site and assume their ultimate colour, but giving them a dose of ‘free’ aluminium in the form of potassium aluminium sulphate (potash alum) can speed up the process — but take care not to overdo it, as the plant may suffer.”

I’ve never actually tried the color-change trick on my hydrangeas, being content instead to let nature do its thing and produce whatever colors the plant thinks most appropriate. I’m actually not even sure if you can change the colors of hydrangeas of the lacecap variety; though I would say that the color variations I see even in these baby bluebirds suggest it might work.

The photos in this post and the previous one are all from three shrubs of the same kind, planted near each other four springs ago — yet some of the blooms show blue colors only, while others include bits of color in the pink/purple ranges. The bluer ones are planted farther back in my garden, where the soil is thicker (I had to build it up quite a bit to work around the ground-level roots of some pine trees) and that extra soil tends to absorb and store more water. Rainwater — we’ve had tons of rain this year — is slightly acidic, so I pretend to know what I’m talking about and say that lots of rain with its acidic content soaking into thicker soil causes the plant to produce more blue blooms, whereas water running off those in the front of the garden reduces the acidity (producing more pink and purple).

I could be wrong about that… or not!

Thanks for taking a look!

Baby Bluebird … Hydrangeas (1 of 2)

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From Hydrangeas by Naomi Slade:

“A thoroughly graceful and elegant hydrangea, the flowers of Bluebird take a classic lacecap form; shapely and understated with large, clear sterile florets around the periphery of a woad-blue dome of fertile blooms.

“The larger flowers are sometimes sparse, but their paucity serves only to emphasize their individual exquisiteness. As in a design, the space around something can be crucial, enhancing it and enabling the observer to fully appreciate the focal point. And should the plant be cruelly criticized for lack of impact, the fact that the flowers are scented should more than repair this deficiency.

“The blue colour is reasonably stable with variations in soil pH, too, although it can be more mauve or even pale pink on a very alkaline site. In autumn, the large sterile florets turn to face downwards and are infused with magenta and mulberry, complemented by the foliage, which turns copper-bronze towards the end of the season.

“The shrub is compact enough to suit small gardens and will also do well in containers. Like all serrata cultivars, it is moderately cold-tolerant but does not find exposed or coastal sites conducive, nor is it a fan of full sun.”

The galleries below feature a few close-up photos of Bluebird hydrangeas in my garden. I took these photos early in the spring, just as the first white petals began to appear, then set them aside while working through and posting many of the spring and summer photos (especially the lily photos) that I had taken at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. This and the next blog post — and several others whose photos I’m still working on — returned me from Oakland to my own back yard where I crept daily among the ferns and hostas to photograph my hydrangeas in their progression to summer from spring. Hydrangeas are mostly desiccated now; here in the southeast they tend to bloom early then lose most of their floweriness by late June or early July.

The lacecap hydrangeas have an interesting structure and biology, having developed a natural variation of the typical design of a flower. The central clusters of tiny buds are properly the plant’s fertilizable flowers; they’ll open a handful at a time (as you can see in the third and last trio of photos below) for pollinators such as bees (and occasionally hummingbirds) that flit from cluster to cluster. The white (or light-bright blue or purple) petals that emerge and often surround the clusters have no reproductive function but still they have a job to do: they’re brightly colored to attract the attention of pollinators who are more likely to notice their luminosity than the mix of darker hues among clusters of flowers.

Can’t you just see the little white petals waving at the birds and the bees?

Hibiscus syriacus (or, When a Rose Is Not a Rose)

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From Garden Flora: The Natural and Cultural History of the Plants In Your Garden by Noel Kingsbury:

“Since the 7th century at least, Hibiscus syriacus has been grown in Korea, where (in the South) it is the national flower, seen as embodying the tenacity and survival instincts of the Korean people and their national culture…. A stylised version of the flower’s five petals is a common part of Korean national iconography. The flowers are eaten in China and Korea, and tea can be made from the leaves….

“Hibiscus syriacus was introduced to Germany from present-day Lebanon in the 16th century, although there had been a considerably longer history of cultivation in the Middle East, and longer still in eastern Asia. Colour variants were often mentioned by early European garden writers, who knew it only as an orangery or greenhouse plant. Doubles were known by the early 19th century. It has been very successful over much of the United States, where it is known as rose of Sharon….”

So I’ve been perched on my back steps frequently over the past few days, waiting patiently for a couple of Lantana plants in my garden to push out sufficiently effluvient (!!) blooms for a small photo-shoot — but so far I’m not satisfied with my test shots and will just keep waiting for them to make better flowers. They seem to be running late this year; though their tardiness is probably because one plant is a transplant, and the other I cut almost to the ground last winter since The Dog seemed to think it was his job to try and pull the leafless plant out of the ground. Once I cut it back, he lost interest… must only be dog-fun if you’re tugging on something ten times your length….

In the meantime, here are a few shots from my Hibiscus syriacus — aka, Rose of Sharon — whose flowers have been blooming daily in the hot July sun.

Roses of Sharon (or is it “Rose of Sharons” or maybe “Roses of Sharons” (not really)) are pretty common here in the southeast; you see them in yards and gardens in all sorts of shapes and sizes — owing, I think, to their ability to tolerate a wide range of conditions as long as they get enough sun to keep happy. They’re technically a shrub — but they don’t seem to know they’re supposed to be shrubby, so you can find them bushing out widely, filling out as much space as you give them and sometimes achieving the heights of two-story houses while producing an enormous number of flowers from mid- to late-summer. My neighbors have one that’s easily thirty feet tall, located between my house and theirs; mine is in a large pot in the sun-section of my back yard and stands about five feet high. I cut it back to a foot or so every fall to keep it pot-sized and it returns with new shoots and leaves every spring.

The bits of what looks like glitter on some of the blooms is just pollen; I normally zap it away using spot-removal in Lightroom, but kept it this time since the light struck it just right and the little dots looked adorably shiny.

Thanks for taking a look!

Epic Lilies (3 of 3)

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From Lilies by Naomi Slade:

“The Victorian passion for botany is legendary. Daring chaps dashed around the globe and new species poured into gardens to the delight and amazement of all who beheld them.

“But gather plants together and, sooner or later, hybrids will emerge; sometimes naturally but often as a result of an irrepressible human desire to improve on nature. While fabulous, lilies had gained a reputation for being challenging and capricious to cultivate. They were exciting; they were expensive; and they were quite likely to die on you after a couple of years. Inevitably, they attracted a certain type of well-heeled horticultural brinksmanship, right up until amenable Lilium regale emerged, bringing down both prices and the level of skill required to cultivate this most desirable of flowers.”

Below is the last batch of photos of my Tiny Epic Asiatic Lily, a few more black-background renderings. The previous posts are:

Epic Lilies (1 of 3)

Epic Lilies (2 of 3)

Coming soon: more lilies!

With spring winding down, the summer varieties are starting to appear — and I’ve made several trips to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens to hunt down and capture some of the rather astonishing varieties that grow well there in large, cultivated spaces (as opposed to pots in my back yard). With a tropical rainstorms hitting my area over the next few days, I’ll be sticking pretty close to home, so will be sorting and processing white ones, yellow ones, red ones, orange ones, and blends of pink and red lilies that (I think) are new to the garden — or at least new to me. Stay tuned…

… and thanks for taking a look!

Epic Lilies (2 of 3)

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From Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perenyi:

“The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the golden age of plant collectors: David Douglas who brought the Douglas fir, the Monterey pine and many other conifers to England; John Jeffrey who followed Douglas to the American West; E. H. [Ernest Henry] Wilson who gave us the Chinese dogwood, the Regale lily and the dazzling Davidia or dove tree that in bloom seems to be aflutter with white birds; Reginald Farrer, George Forrest and dozens of others who changed the face of our gardens….

“Plant collecting was a dangerous business then. Douglas was torn to pieces by a wild bull in Hawaii; Farrar met his end in Upper Burma; Jeffrey vanished into the California gold rush; Forrest died of heart failure on his seventh expedition to Yunnan. And since that time the floral storehouses of western Asia have become if anything more difficult to penetrate….

“We hear no more of famous botanist-explorers or newly discovered specimens for the garden. Today it is the hybridizers who revolutionize our plantings, and of these none has wrought more changes than the American lily breeders in the last thirty years. We can now be said to dominate this field, though the lilies themselves have come from every part of the earth.”

From 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells:

“Ernest Wilson, called ‘Chinese Wilson’ because he explored so extensively in China, just escaped sacrificing his life to lilies. He went twice to China, the second time in 1910, to collect the regal lily. He had gathered an enormous load of lily bulbs and was on his way home with them when his mule train was caught by an avalanche. He jumped out of his sedan chair just before it was hurled down a precipice. His leg was shattered by a falling rock. There was a mule train coming the other way, and the only way it could pass without, perhaps, causing another avalanche was for Wilson to lie on his back while more than forty mules stepped over him. He reached safety but was left with what he called a ‘lily limp.'”

I don’t normally repeat quotations from one blog post to another (in fact, it’s a “thing” for me to double-check my blog to be sure I’m not repeating quotes) — but I did this time because of the references to Ernest Wilson, a British explorer and plant collector active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first quote expresses the risks such explorers took as they scoured the world botanically; the second describes in more detail an occasion where one of them almost lost their lives in search of flowering plants.

I honestly never knew such things had occurred; it’s becoming a fun learning experience for me to begin seeing the historical through-line represented by the lives of botanists and naturalists. What I began by simply looking for neat quotations about the flowers I was photographing seems to be morphing into a new (for me!) view into history from an unfamiliar (and unexpected) perspective. I always start a new post by looking for quotations, and now end out digging a little into the lives and times of people I come across, gathering bits of new information in the way I like to learn — a rather messy accumulation that I don’t worry too much about sorting out but just pile on instead.

From a Western or European perspective, the period (roughly) from 1800 through the early 1900s represent the culmination of the “Age of Exploration” — which also coincided with expanding European empire, the rise of the United States as a world-influencing power, the explosion of technological and scientific inventions, and the gradual (though debatable) increase in leisure time. Botany, as a science, has undoubtedly ancient roots; but it coalesced and connected to consumer culture and leisure time during the 1800s as more people became capable of outfitting their homes and gardens with new, and even exotic, plant species discovered by the plant explorers or developed by horticulturists. You may have never thought about it this way, but the fact that you (if you’re a gardener, or even if you’re not) can acquire plants in handy packaging to populate your garden or feature in a kitchen window has a direct historical connection to the plant explorers of the past.

Or, in other words, your trips to a nursery or Home Depot to buy plants and gardening supplies are actually a late-Victorian era invention. Isn’t that something?

With a thankful nod to Ernest Wilson: The photos below are a second batch of Tiny Epic Asiatic Lilies from my garden (the first photos are here: Epic Lilies (1 of 3)), rendered with black backgrounds rather than bricks from my courtyard.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!